All aboard! the Richmond Station refurbishment
The leafy and affluent London Borough of Richmond-Upon-Thames has had a railway station since the early 1840s, with the current city centre station constructed at its current location in 1937. The imposing Art Deco building was designed by James Robb Scott who was also responsible for several other station designs including Durrington-on-Sea, Wimbledon, and Waterloo railway stations.
With a Portland stone façade, many of the original Art Deco details had been removed or changed. Through a joint partnership, South Western Railways and the Railway Heritage Trust would look to revitalise the building and replace and renew many of the lost or degraded original features.
Thomann-Hanry® were selected as one of the key specialist partners on this project to help reinvigorate and revitalise a key public building to its former glory. The scope of work which Thomann-Hanry® undertook included a photographic condition façade survey, façade clean using the façade gommage cleaning system, as well as restoration and repairs to the Portland stone façade.
Scaffold-Free Façade Survey
With a fixed deadline for completion, and multiple specialist contractors all requiring previous works to have been completed prior to their commencement, the need to ensure schedules were met became imperative to prevent the deadline being missed.
This was not the main consideration, as with an estimated 8.8 million passengers using the station every year (or just under 25,000 per day) the need to ensure the smooth running of the station and flow of passengers meant that scaffolding would not be an option and that any works would need to be conducted outside of normal working hours.
Scaffold-Free Façade Clean
With a quick turnaround of the photographic condition commercial building façade survey, which was aided by use of MEWPs (Mobile Elevating Work Platforms). This cuts down the time required due to no costly, visually unappealing, and intrusive scaffolding being needed.
Using MEWPs, and unlike that of a Drone façade survey, Thomann-Hanry® can get up close to the façade, inspect, record and when needed, remove and make safe items which could fall from the building.
With extensive biofilm and algal growth on the South-Western facing façade, prior to the high quality deep clean offered by the scaffold-free, water-free, low-pressure façade gommage cleaning system, a high-temperature, low-pressure steam treatment was applied. This help kill off any spores or phytobacteria which could be on or trapped in the surface of the stone.
Commercial & Heritage Façade Cleaning
Our expert team then began the swift process of cleaning the Portland stone façade using the scaffold-free, water-free, low-pressure façade gommage cleaning system which helps to gently wipe away the decades of dirt and grime without damaging the façade substrate, which can happen if using high pressure or solvent based cleaning methods. This offers a high level commercial and heritage building façade clean, which is fast, effective, and convenient, even in the busiest of sites.
As MEWPs are used during the cleaning process, they can be easily moved off site during the sites normal opening hours to help reduce the impact to the station’s users experience. This would not have been the case if scaffolding had been erected, as this would have had to remain on site for the entire duration of the project.
With the surface freshly cleaned, our expert masons worked to repair, replace, and rejuvenate the Portland stone façade, to help restore it to its original Art Deco glory.
“We selected Thomann-Hanry® on the basis of their innovative methodology that avoided the need for scaffolding and minimised disruption to our customers. This proved very much to be the case and in conjunction with the very effective and non-invasive façade gommage method of cleaning, gave us an impressive result. Thomann-Hanry® were also a great team to work with and were flexible and helpful at every stage of the process.”