Scaffolding Amersham

Scaffolding in Amersham

Amersham is a little over an hour from our yard at Enslow and it is really two towns. Old Amersham sits in the bottom of the Misbourne valley and has looked much as it does now since the seventeenth century; Amersham-on-the-Hill is Metroland, built out from the railway after 1892. They are a mile apart, a hundred feet of chalk apart, and they need different scaffolding.

Old Town, new town: why the hill decides the scaffold

The Old Town is one long High Street of timber-framed, flint and Georgian brick buildings with more than a hundred and fifty of them listed and almost all of it a conservation area. The earliest houses are oak frames with wattle and daub between; flint split from the local chalk faces a good many walls; and the brick and tile came from kilns in the town itself. None of those materials wants a drilled anchor in it.

The Hill is a different century. Arts and Crafts villas and inter-war semis and detached houses spread out from the station along Sycamore Road, Hill Avenue, Chesham Road and the roads off them: brick, render and tile-hanging, proper side access, and plots that frequently step down the slope towards the valley.

• In the Old Town the question is how to tie. Flint rubble will not hold an expanding anchor reliably and a timber frame should not be asked to take one, so we use reveal ties through window openings, buttressed bays, or a raking or freestanding design that never touches the fabric. More tube, more time, and a scaffold the conservation officer is happy with.
• On the Hill the question is the ground. Chalk with clay-with-flints over it drains well but the gardens fall away, so a scaffold is often set on three or four different levels and designed from the lowest standard up.
• In both the question is access. Old Town pavements are narrow and the High Street is busy; Hill plots have side access but it is often a shared drive or a tight gate. Where the lorry stands and whether material is carried or craned is settled on the site visit, not on the day.

Approvals: Buckinghamshire Council, the Chilterns, and a lot of listed buildings

• Buckinghamshire Council is the highway authority for Amersham, Chesham, the Chalfonts and the Missendens. It is a unitary authority, so it is also the planning and conservation authority: one council for the licence and the listed-building questions.
• A scaffold on the public highway — any pavement, path or road — needs a licence under section 169 of the Highways Act 1980. We apply, and the licence runs for as long as the scaffold stands. On the Old Town High Street the pedestrian protection is drawn into it.
• Listed buildings and the conservation area. Scaffolding itself rarely needs listed building consent, but fixings into historic fabric can, and the work the scaffold serves usually does. We would rather agree the tie pattern with the conservation officer before the scaffold goes up than argue about holes afterwards.
• The Chilterns National Landscape covers the town and the villages around it. It is a planning matter rather than a scaffolding one, but it shapes what the work is and how long it takes.

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

What we put up in Amersham

• Re-roofs and chimney work — the staple, from Old Town clay tile to the Hill’s inter-war roofs.
• Repointing, render and facade repair — lime work on flint and brick in the Old Town, longer hires and a longer licence.
• Loft conversions and extensions — the Hill’s semis and villas, with the scaffold stepping down a sloping garden.
• Commercial — the High Street shops, pubs and hotels, Sycamore Road and Hill Avenue, the schools and the hospital, worked around the people inside them.
• Temporary roofs — weather protection on a winter re-roof, particularly on a listed building that has to stay dry and occupied.
• Domestic — windows, solar, rendering and gutters across the Hill, Chesham Bois and Little Chalfont.

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 freestanding scaffold on a flint wall, a pedestrian tunnel 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 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 stability.
• CDM 2015 — applies to domestic projects too, with the duties passing to the contractor.

CISRS-qualified and CITB-trained scaffolders, Advanced CHAS accredited, £10 million public liability, 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 an Amersham job the number moves on:

• How much scaffold and how high.
• Duty class — what the work actually loads the platform with.
• How it is tied — reveal ties, buttresses or a freestanding design on a listed flint front cost more than drilled anchors in a modern cavity wall, and we say so.
• The slope — a scaffold set on several levels down a Hill garden is more tube and more time than one on a flat drive.
• Highway licence and pedestrian protection — on the Old Town High Street, part of the price.
• Access — a shared drive, a private road, or a tight Old Town yard decides whether material is carried or craned.
• Hire period — written into the quotation with an extension rate stated.

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

Questions we get asked here

Scaffolders in Amersham, and what hiring us involves

Amersham is a little over an hour from Enslow, and we run it with Beaconsfield and Gerrards Cross and High Wycombe, so a job here is part of a run rather than a one-off trip. Scaffolding hire in Amersham is a hire period with erection and strike included and an honest extension cost if the job runs on.

• Buckinghamshire Council is the highway authority. A scaffold on the footway needs their licence; we apply.
• Free quotation and site visit. Photographs are usually enough on the Hill; in the Old Town we come and look, because the tie pattern is the price.
• Hire in weeks — four to eight typically.
• CISRS-qualified scaffolders, £10 million public liability, scafftags and recorded inspections.

Commercial and industrial scaffolding in Amersham

Commercial work here is the Old Town High Street — occupied, listed, trading underneath, so gantries, pedestrian protection and out-of-hours erection — and the Hill’s shopping streets, the schools and Amersham Hospital, where the programme belongs to the people inside. There is little heavy industry; what there is sits on the trading estates off the A404 and A413 and is handled as industrial scaffolding with freestanding or kentledged designs. See commercial scaffolding.

Where in Amersham we work

• The Old Town. High Street, Broadway, Church Street, Whielden Street and the Market Square: timber frame, flint and brick, listed almost throughout, narrow pavements.
• Amersham-on-the-Hill. Sycamore Road, Hill Avenue, Chesham Road, Rectory Hill, Station Road and the Metroland roads off them; sloping plots and side access.
• Chesham Bois and Little Chalfont. Large detached houses in the woods, private roads, long drives.
• Chalfont St Giles, Chalfont St Peter and the Missendens. Chalk-valley villages, flint cottages, single-track lanes.
• Hyde Heath, Coleshill and Penn. Hilltop villages a few minutes out.
• Chesham. The next town up the valley, old brick and a market square, same run.

Around Amersham

We cover the villages too — Chesham Bois, Little Chalfont, Chalfont St Giles, Chalfont St Peter, Little and Great Missenden, Hyde Heath, Coleshill and Penn. Nearby we have pages for Beaconsfield and Gerrards Cross, High Wycombe, Wendover, Aylesbury and the county page for Buckinghamshire.