Barkers of Kensington is a Portland stone clad steel framed building from the Art Deco 1930’s and has the typical challenges of waterproofing and steel frame corrosion that has blighted so many similar buildings in central London.

The main challenges associated with this project centered around the fact that the building was situated on Kensington High Street which has an extremely high footfall and that the building is the global headquarters of a newspaper company.

Our approach to the project focused on maintaining minimal impact on the ongoing daily activity of the tenants and minimizing disruption to the public. Our early engagement on the project to develop a robust logistics programme and strategy for accessing the works was an important cog in the success of the scheme.

With our scaffold designers we were able to develop an innovative gantry design utilizing HAKI Tripods. Each single tripod could carry a permissible load of 60Kn which reduced enormously the amount of scaffolding that had to be used at street level.

Using the HAKI tripods helped us to achieve huge time savings compared with using tube and fittings.

It also enabled the pavement to be kept open throughout the project (even allowing the free movement of mobility scooters) and also provided clear visibility of display windows while work was progressing.

Our experience and success in designing and installing complex scaffolds in public environments provided us with the best platform to deliver a challenging masonry restoration project.