The Building Conservation Directory 2023

152 T H E B U I L D I N G C O N S E R VAT I O N D I R E C T O R Y 2 0 2 3 | C E L E B R AT I N G 3 0 Y E A R S C AT H E D R A L C O M M U N I C AT I O N S RESTORATION WORK Despite the project being developed and procured during Covid 19, the specialist teams have been on site since January 2021. Restoring a building of this quality is difficult and historic fabric is often fragile and vulnerable to damage if treated incorrectly. The management team needed to engage early with the specialists that would be undertaking the most sensitive work, which included the cleaning and repair of the stained glass by York Glaziers Trust and decorative painted surfaces by Hirst Conservation. In order to reduce risk for the main contractor, HH Smith, the team decided to name the specialists within the contract, a practice that is not used frequently nowadays and is often regarded as unadvisable. However, on this project it has been absolutely essential and allowed long term partnerships to emerge. One of the real benefits of these partnerships is that the team can work together to develop and deliver substantive training and volunteer programmes for young people and residents of Rochdale. These have proved immensely valuable and popular, and to date the project has already provided two 12-week conservation training courses for 19 interested local people, and 278 volunteer opportunities which range from research and archive documentation work, furniture and timber cleaning, cleaning of the Great Hall ceiling and work with artists on the co-creation of the interpretation. Conservation work has been bolstered by employing ten young people from the local college on 16-week paid work placements to work alongside conservators from Hirst Conservation. By the end of 2022 contractors had been on site for over 18 months and most of the public areas of the Town Hall are due to reopen in early Autumn 2023. The main contractor, HH Smith of Manchester, was procured via a two-stage OJEU process. (Advertising in the Official Journal of the European Union was then a requirement for UK public sector contracts over a certain value – the process was designed to ensure transparency and market engagement where the public’s money was being spent.) The project is a multi-million pound set of contracts and has included nearly £9m from the NLHF and nearly £2m from the central government decarbonisation fund (Salix) allowing the town hall to install a new sub-station and air source heat pumps. The works include a major redevelopment of the public realm that surrounds the site, including the closure of roads, relocation of car parking and the creation of an events space and setting fitting for a building of this significance. Most of the work consists of removing modern interventions, fully replacing the mechanical, electrical and plumbing (MEP) installations, providing equity of access and cleaning decades of nicotine and inappropriate varnish from the internal surfaces. The MEP installation is challenging in that the brief was to remove all surface mounted wiring and pipework and to conceal all the new systems. Programming of the works has proved very complex with several specialists working in the same historic rooms. In several areas conservators from York Glaziers Trust are not only cleaning and repairing the stained glass but they are also adding a new protective glass leaf externally, fabricated in lead to follow the design of the internal leaf. This new leaf protects the painted surface of the stained glass from further deterioration and is regarded as the very best method of giving stained glass a long-term future. In A conservator from York Glaziers Trust painting a metal saddle bar to protect it from corrosion.