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How many bricks?

AW Rail – We recently completed a project for our valued client CML (Construction Marine Ltd) near Finsbury Park Station in North London. We were tasked to rebuild a significant portion of this retaining wall/parapet which had fallen into a poor state of repair with numerous areas of spalling, displaced brickwork, and mortar loss.

The wall was 160m in length and due to its location careful consideration had to be undertaken to track side neighbours, these being two hotels and student accommodation blocks. This meant that we had restrictive working hours for our teams which averaged 15 operatives per day over a 14-week period.

Before any repair works could be undertaken, we had to carefully remove a large amount of vegetation which had taken hold within the existing parapet wall and the retaining wall below. A large amount of buddleia was removed and treated with ecoplugs to ensure that it did not grow back and cause further damage.

The removal of the existing parapet wall down to stringer level along with the coping stones which had become severely dislodged by weathering and root ingress. All this done by hand and removed to waiting skips via scaffold shoots.

The parapet wall height of between 7 & 9m sitting atop the retaining wall meant that a large scaffold solution was needed in a tightly confined space between the wall and adjacent buildings. Getting materials to site, bricks, sand, cement, lime and more meant that we were unable to use any traditional powered means of lifting materials to site level. We relied on the physical manpower of our operatives on site to mechanically lift all the materials by scaffold hoist – some 33,000 bricks! Careful consideration had to be employed for effective weight distribution across the scaffold span whilst in use.

Whilst on site some design changes had to be incorporated into the original scope of the project. Working closely with our client CML our Project Manager Anthony Buckley managed these changes supported by our teams back at our Folkestone HQ.

Completing the project, we installed a 250mm high E17 GRP handrail along the entire 160m length of newly built parapet walling. The site was left clean and tidy each day making sure we took into consideration our lineside neighbours.

This may have been a challenging project for everyone involved given the works location and the logistics of getting materials to site within the restrictive working hours. With everyone committing to the project these challenges were easily overcome and a successful project was delivered to our client on time.