Commercial Scaffolding Stroud

Commercial scaffolding in Stroud

Stroud sits where five steep valleys meet, and the valleys are lined with the tall stone and brick mills that made the town’s cloth for three hundred years. Scaffolding commercial work here is less about the buildings than about the ground they stand on. On a sloping site the foundation and a level first lift are the job, and a quotation that treats a Stroud valley like a flat car park has not looked at the site.

Steep sites: the base is the job

Very little in Stroud is level. The town centre climbs from the station up the High Street and Gloucester Street; the Slad, Painswick, Frome, Nailsworth and Chalford valleys fall away steeply on every side; and the mill sites sit on the valley floors with banks, watercourses and retaining walls around them. That changes the scaffold before it changes anything else.

• Stepped foundations. On a slope the standards are founded at different levels, on properly bedded sole plates, with base lifts that bring the working platforms level. The design accounts for the fall rather than ignoring it.
• Ground that holds. Made ground, old mill yards and banks near a watercourse spread a load badly. We size the base for what is actually under it.
• Access for the lorry. Narrow lanes and steep drives decide how the materials get to the face, and sometimes that means a smaller vehicle or a longer carry, priced in.
• Wind on the valley sides. An exposed elevation high on a valley side catches more wind than its height suggests, and sheeting or debris netting is designed with that in mind.

The Stroud mills

The Stroud valleys hold one of the best groups of industrial buildings in the country. Stanley Mills at King’s Stanley, one of the earliest fire-proof mills, is now home to a range of businesses. Ebley Mill houses Stroud District Council. Dunkirk Mills in the Nailsworth valley, the Lodgemore and Fromehall mills, and dozens more are offices, workshops, studios and apartments. Many are listed, several to a high grade.

Scaffolding a mill is a design job. They are tall — four, five and six storeys — with long elevations, heavy masonry and regular window openings, and they often stand on the valley floor beside a mill race or the canal. The combination of height, listed fabric and difficult ground puts most mill work outside the scope of TG20 and into an engineer’s design, with tie positions agreed with the conservation officer and the base designed for the ground on the day.

Brimscombe Port, Stonehouse and new commercial work

The restoration of the Cotswold Canals has brought new life to the corridor between Stonehouse and Chalford, and Brimscombe Port is being brought forward for homes, workspace and public space around the restored basin. Further west, Stonehouse has the district’s main business parks along the A419 and the new Great Oldbury neighbourhood, with employment land alongside the homes.

New-build and conversion work on constrained canal-side sites is about access, edge protection near water, temporary roofs and fitting in with the principal contractor’s logistics. On the business parks it is portal frames and cladding, where the tying is the hard part and the design usually goes freestanding or kentledged.

Approvals: county highways, Stroud District planning

• Gloucestershire County Council is the highway authority. A scaffold on the footway or road in Stroud, Nailsworth, Stonehouse or the valleys needs its licence under section 169 of the Highways Act 1980; a hoarding needs one under section 172.
• Stroud District Council handles planning, listed building consent and the conservation areas, including the Industrial Heritage Conservation Area that follows the valleys and their mills.
• Watercourses and canals. Where a scaffold stands beside a mill race, a river or the restored canal, the base and the edge are designed for the water, and the owner or navigation authority is told in advance where their land is affected.
• Steep streets. On a steep footway the licence and the pedestrian route are planned together, because a scaffold that narrows a sloping pavement changes how people walk past it.

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 Stroud

• 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 five-storey listed mill on sloping ground, a pedestrian gantry 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.
• 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 Stroud

There is no honest per-metre rate, and in Stroud the ground moves the number as much as the building does:

• Area and height — a mill elevation is long and tall; a town-centre shopfront is neither.
• The slope — stepped foundations and base lifts on sloping ground are extra scaffold, and they are priced as such.
• Duty class — masonry repair on a mill is a heavy duty; inspection and repainting are lighter.
• Design — most mill and canal-side work needs an engineer’s design.
• Access — narrow lanes, steep drives and long carries from where the lorry can stop.
• Highway licence and protection — licence duration, fans and gantries on the town’s steep streets.
• 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 Stroud

Commercial scaffolders in Stroud, and what hiring us involves

Stroud is about an hour and ten minutes from our yard at Enslow, near Kidlington, through Cirencester on the A419. We run it with Cirencester and Gloucester, so a Stroud contract is part of a regular county run. 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 a sloping site we always come and look before we price.
• Design and calculations for your CDM file wherever the scaffold needs them.
• Seven-day inspections, scafftags and a handover record.

Where in and around Stroud we work

• Stroud town centre. The High Street, Gloucester Street, Kendrick Street and Merrywalks.
• The mills. Stanley Mills, Ebley, Lodgemore, Fromehall, Dunkirk and the valley-floor sites.
• Brimscombe, Thrupp and Chalford. The canal corridor, Brimscombe Port and the mill villages.
• Stonehouse and Great Oldbury. Business parks along the A419 and the new neighbourhood.
• Nailsworth, Minchinhampton and Painswick. Stone town centres, schools and offices.
• Dursley, Cam and Wotton-under-Edge. The southern end of the district.

Around Stroud

We also cover Stonehouse, Nailsworth, Minchinhampton, Painswick, Chalford, Brimscombe, Dursley, Cam and Wotton-under-Edge. Elsewhere in the county we have pages for commercial scaffolding Gloucester, commercial scaffolding Cheltenham, commercial scaffolding Cirencester, and the county page for commercial scaffolding in Gloucestershire.