Commercial Scaffolding Cirencester

Commercial scaffolding in Cirencester

Cirencester is our nearest Gloucestershire town — around thirty miles from the yard at Enslow, closer than Milton Keynes — and it is the one that most resembles the work we do every week in west Oxfordshire. Cotswold stone frontages, listed buildings on the Market Place, a working industrial estate on the edge of town and a university campus outside it. The constraints are familiar to us, and so is the conservation officer’s point of view.

Cotswold stone: soft, beautiful and hard to fix into

Cirencester’s centre — the Market Place, Dyer Street, Castle Street, Cricklade Street, Black Jack Street and the streets around the parish church of St John the Baptist — is built almost entirely in the local oolitic limestone. It is a lovely material and a difficult one to scaffold. The stone is soft, often friable on older faces, and laid in thin courses with lime joints that do not take an anchor the way a modern wall does.

• Ties go into joints, not faces, and through window openings wherever the building allows, because a hole in a weathered stone face is permanent.
• Fixings are agreed before they are drilled. On a listed frontage the conservation officer will want to know where and how, and how it is made good afterwards.
• Where the stone will not take a tie, the scaffold goes to the ground on buttresses or is designed to be self-supporting.
• Stone slate roofs are heavy and fragile. Roof work on them needs a working platform at the right height and loading planned around stacks of reclaimed slate.

Love Lane and the commercial edge of town

Love Lane Industrial Estate is the town’s principal employment area, close to the A417 and A419 junctions, with Cirencester Business Park and the trade parks around it. The buildings are mostly portal-framed units, workshops and modern offices, and the work is cladding replacement, roofing, gutters, rooflights and solar. Like every clad frame, they give a scaffold very little to tie into, so the design goes freestanding or kentledged and is priced that way.

These are also live sites. We work to the occupier’s rules — inductions, vehicle routes, permits and exclusion zones — and programme erection around deliveries rather than through them.

The Royal Agricultural University, schools and estates

Outside the town, the Royal Agricultural University has occupied its campus on the Tetbury Road since the nineteenth century, with listed college buildings alongside newer teaching and residential blocks. Further out are the schools, the hotels, the large country estates and the visitor attractions of the south Cotswolds. That work is about access across a campus or estate, programming around term or opening times, and treating listed stone with the same care as the Market Place.

Approvals: county highways, Cotswold District planning

• Gloucestershire County Council is the highway authority. A scaffold on the footway or road in Cirencester needs its licence under section 169 of the Highways Act 1980; a hoarding needs one under section 172. The district council does not issue them.
• Cotswold District Council handles planning, listed building consent and the conservation areas, from its offices in Cirencester. The town centre conservation area covers the Market Place and most of the historic core.
• Most of the district is in the Cotswolds National Landscape (the former AONB), which affects the work the scaffold serves more than the scaffold itself, but it is part of why the conservation conversation matters here.
• Markets and events. The Market Place hosts regular markets and town events, and a frontage scaffold there is programmed so it does not land on the wrong day.

We apply for the highway licence as the scaffolding contractor. The county charges by duration and the footway occupied, so any figure we give before the application goes in is a budget figure.

What we put up in Cirencester

• Commercial scaffolding — occupied shops, offices, hotels and schools, with the footway protected and the programme worked around trading.
• Industrial scaffolding — portal-frame units, cladding and roofline work, freestanding or kentledged where there is nothing to tie into.
• Temporary roofs — weather protection over a re-roof or a strip-out on a building that stays in use.
• Pedestrian protection — fans, boarded gantries and lit walkways where the public passes beneath.
• Scaffold inspections — our own scaffolds at every statutory interval, and reports on scaffolds erected by others.

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 tall listed stone frontage tied only through its openings, a buttressed scaffold or a temporary roof over a stone slate re-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.
• BS EN 12811-1 — the duty classes. A class 2 inspection scaffold and a class 4 masonry scaffold look the same from the street and are not the same thing, and it is the commonest reason two commercial prices differ.
• 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 its stability.
• CDM 2015 — we work to the principal contractor’s construction phase plan, provide RAMS and design calculations for the file, and hand over with the inspection record.

CISRS-qualified and CITB-trained scaffolders, Advanced CHAS accredited, £10 million public liability, RAMS and a job-specific toolbox talk before anyone starts. Oxfordshire Prestige Awards Scaffold Company of the Year since 2020.

How we price commercial work in Cirencester

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

• Area and height — three-storey stone frontages in the centre, long low elevations on Love Lane.
• Duty class — stonework and masonry repair is a heavy duty; inspection and repainting are lighter.
• Tie strategy — joints and openings on Cotswold stone, or buttresses where the stone will not take a tie, priced in from the start.
• Loading — stone slate and reclaimed stone are heavy, and loading bays are designed for them.
• Highway licence and protection — licence duration, fans and gantries on the narrow streets of the centre.
• Hire period — written into the quotation with an extension rate stated.

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

Questions we get asked about Cirencester

Commercial scaffolders in Cirencester, and what hiring us involves

Cirencester is under an hour from our yard at Enslow, near Kidlington — nearer than most of the other places we work every week. We run it with the west Oxfordshire Cotswolds around Burford and with Stroud, so it is a regular run, not an occasional one. Commercial scaffolding hire here is a designed, licensed and inspected scaffold for a stated hire period, with erection, strike and the inspection record included.

• Gloucestershire County Council is the highway authority. We apply for the footway licence.
• Free site visit and written quotation. On listed stone we always come and look.
• Design and calculations for your CDM file wherever the scaffold needs them.
• Seven-day inspections, scafftags and a handover record.

Where in and around Cirencester we work

• The Market Place, Dyer Street, Castle Street and Cricklade Street. Listed stone shops, banks, pubs and offices.
• Love Lane, Cirencester Business Park and the trade parks. Industrial units, workshops and offices.
• The Royal Agricultural University and the Tetbury Road. College buildings and campus blocks.
• Tetbury, Fairford, Lechlade and South Cerney. Stone town centres, hotels and the Cotswold Water Park.
• Kemble, Siddington, Bibury and the villages. Estates, schools and country hotels.

Around Cirencester

We also cover Tetbury, Fairford, Lechlade, South Cerney, Kemble, Siddington, Bibury and the south Cotswold villages. Elsewhere in the county we have pages for commercial scaffolding Gloucester, commercial scaffolding Cheltenham, commercial scaffolding Stroud, and the county page for commercial scaffolding in Gloucestershire.