The scaffolding has been designed as a permanent structure with tolerances built in for snow and wind loading, it even has rain gutters. Due to its size and the length of time it’s going to be in place, it has been built with entirely new steel tubes. The structure is free standing rather than being tied to the building, instead it’s weighted down with 400 tonnes of concrete kentledge or ballast.
A gap of 20 to 30mm left between the scaffold and the house allows the scaffold to shift small amounts over time and in windy conditions whilst preventing any further damage to the walls that it surrounds. The special roof covering acts like a roller blind, allowing us to peel individual sections back so that we can still gain access to the house using our cranes.
Normally when we use scaffolding we work on one section of a building at a time but in this case we needed to wrap an entire mansion, so we needed vast quantities of materials to get the job done. If you were to take all of the scaffold tubes and place them end to end they’d stretch for 32 miles taking you from Clandon, east to Sevenoaks in Kent, south to Brighton, or straight up through the stratosphere and into the lower levels of the mesosphere.