West Square House
West Square House
As conservation advisors and structural engineers, we were approached by the owner of a fine, Grade II listed, five-storey Georgian house. A rear bow bay had suffered from significant rotational movement and bowed outwards by around 100mm between ground and first floor level windows and inwards by around 70mm up the sides of the first-floor level window.
The challenge for us was to design a simple, elegant and sympathetic solution that arrested further bowing movement to prevent the wall from becoming unstable in the future. One obvious alternative would be to rebuild large sections of the bay wall, but this would have caused major disruption to the owner, the loss of historic fabric and it would have been very costly to our client. We felt that a more sympathetic solution was possible.
We devised a system of interconnected stainless-steel straps to work in tension and wrap around the bowing parts of the wall and hold the wall in place to prevent further movement. These straps were then tied back to the internal floor structures and anchored into masonry return walls at first and second floor levels. External straps wrap around the outward bowing sections, exposed on the outside of the wall. Internal straps wrap up the sides of the first-floor level windows, hidden within the plaster finish. The anchoring ties are hidden under the floor boards at first and second floor levels.
Working closely with our conservation team we put together a Listed Building Consent submission, including heritage and structural statements, and made the application to Southwark on behalf of our client, which was ultimately successful. The installation of the straps is now complete and with limited disturbance to the client. The finished result appears as intended: simple and elegant.
Client: Private