Scaffolding Towcester

Scaffolding in Towcester

Towcester is about thirty-five minutes from our yard at Enslow, up through Brackley. It is a Roman town — Lactodorum — and the road the Romans built is still running through the middle of it. That one fact dominates scaffolding here more than the buildings do.

Watling Street, and why the A5 changes the job

Most market towns we work in have a quiet high street with a bit of delivery traffic. Towcester has the A5. Watling Street runs dead straight through the historic core, and the Georgian frontages along it — the old coaching inns and town houses from Towcester’s days as a staging post on the London to Holyhead road — sit directly onto a working trunk route.

Scaffolding a frontage on a road like that is a different exercise from scaffolding one on a side street. The questions are not really about the scaffold:

• Is any part of it in the carriageway, or only the footway? Footway-only is a straightforward licence. Anything encroaching on the running lane brings traffic management into it, and that is a separate conversation with the highway authority.
• Can pedestrians still get past? On a narrow A5 footway the answer is often only with a properly designed pedestrian route, which usually means a tunnel rather than a simple fan.
• When can we erect and strike? On a busy frontage that frequently means early mornings or outside peak, which affects the price honestly rather than secretly.
• How do we load? There is often nowhere legal to stand a lorry for long. That slows the erect, and a quotation that ignores it is a quotation that will change.

None of this is exotic — it is ordinary town-centre scaffolding done properly. But it is why we would rather look at an A5 frontage in person than price it from an address.

Approvals: one council, and a different way of charging

Towcester is simpler than our Oxfordshire towns in one respect and more expensive to get wrong in another.

• West Northamptonshire Council is a unitary authority, so it is both the highway authority and the planning authority. One council, not two. That genuinely does make the process easier than in Oxfordshire, where highways sit with the county and planning with the district.
• The licence for a scaffold on the public highway is required under section 169 of the Highways Act 1980, as it is everywhere in England.

The catch is the fee basis. West Northamptonshire charges by the length of the scaffold rather than issuing one flat fee regardless of size. That catches people out, because it means a long frontage costs materially more in licence fees than a narrow one — and it is a cost that scales with the job rather than sitting as a fixed line.

Any licence figure we quote is indicative, taken from published council schedules. Fees change and vary with length, footway width and duration, so treat it as a budget figure until the application actually goes in.

The historic core along Watling Street is a conservation area with a good number of listed buildings in it. Scaffolding itself does not normally need consent, but the work it serves often does, and fixings into historic fabric can be a conservation matter worth settling before the scaffold goes up.

What we put up in Towcester

• Commercial — shops, pubs and offices on Watling Street, trading underneath while we work, with the public route protected.
• Re-roofs and chimney work — the staple, on everything from Georgian town houses to the modern estates.
• Repointing and facade repair — longer hire periods, and on a highway frontage that means a longer licence too.
• Temporary roofs — weather protection on a winter re-roof, particularly on older buildings that have to stay occupied.
• Events and temporary structures — camera platforms, staging and grandstands. With Silverstone and the racecourse nearby this is a real part of the local work.
• Domestic — extensions, loft conversions, rendering, windows and solar.

The standards we work to

• TG20:21 — NASC technical guidance for tube-and-fitting scaffolds. Inside its scope the scaffold comes with a TG20 compliance sheet. A pedestrian tunnel, a heavily loaded frontage or a temporary roof puts you outside it and into an engineer’s design.
• SG4 — NASC guidance on preventing falls while the scaffold is erected, altered or struck. It governs how our people work.
• BS EN 12811-1 — the duty classes. A class 2 inspection scaffold and a class 4 masonry scaffold look identical from the street and are not the same thing. It is the commonest reason two prices differ sharply.
• Work at Height Regulations 2005 — a scaffold in use is inspected at intervals not exceeding seven days, and again after anything likely to have affected stability. On a trunk-road frontage, vehicle strike is a real risk and exactly the sort of thing those inspections catch.
• IStructE Temporary Demountable Structures — the relevant guidance for grandstands and staging rather than access scaffolds.
• CDM 2015 — applies to domestic projects too, with the duties passing to the contractor.

CISRS-qualified and CITB-trained scaffolders, Advanced CHAS accredited, RAMS and a job-specific toolbox talk before anyone starts. More on our scaffolding questions page.

How we price it

There is no honest per-metre rate. On a Towcester job the number moves on:

• How much scaffold and how high.
• Duty class — what the work actually loads the platform with.
• Frontage length — which here affects the licence fee directly, not just the material.
• Pedestrian protection — a fan is one thing, a full tunnel on a narrow A5 footway is another.
• Traffic management — if any part of the scaffold touches the carriageway, that is a separate cost and a separate approval.
• Erect and strike timing — out-of-hours work on a busy frontage costs more, and we say so rather than burying it.
• Hire period — the licence runs for as long as the scaffold does.

The quotation states the duty class, the hire period, what is included and what is not.

Questions we get asked here

Around Towcester

We cover the surrounding villages too — Silverstone, Greens Norton, Blakesley, Pattishall, Roade and Deanshanger. Nearby we have pages for Brackley, Northampton, Buckingham and Milton Keynes.