There are many applications and uses for retaining walls, and a variety of materials and structures that can be used to construct a retaining wall it all depends on the purpose of the structure and the loads that will be placed on it.

A concrete retaining wall could be as straight forward as using wooden railway sleepers to create raised flower beds in a garden, which will retaining a small earth load. At the other end of the scale you could have a precast concrete crib wall retaining an earth bank on a motorway cutting, either way the most important thing is selecting the correct product for the application for which it will be used.

The most common material for constructing a retaining wall is concrete, this can either be constructed onsite or ‘insitu’ using shuttering and is reinforced using steel bars and mesh, or it can be precast in a specialist precast concrete factory. The finished sections would then be delivered to site where they would be fixed to create a retaining wall.