Scaffolding Princes Risborough

Scaffolding in Princes Risborough

Princes Risborough is about forty minutes from our yard at Enslow, round through Thame. It sits at the foot of the Chiltern escarpment, and the two things that define scaffolding here are the building material — flint — and the slope behind the town.

Flint, and why you cannot tie into it

The Chiltern building tradition is flint. Across the older parts of Princes Risborough and the surrounding villages you will find walls of knapped or whole flint, usually laid in thick lime mortar, with brick quoins at the corners, brick dressings round the openings, and sometimes brick lacing courses running through.

From a scaffolder’s point of view flint is close to the worst material there is to fix into. It is extremely hard but brittle, the individual stones are small and irregular, and crucially they are held in place by the mortar rather than bonded to each other. Drill an expanding anchor into a flint wall and one of three things happens: you shatter the flint, you blow out the surrounding mortar, or you get a fixing that feels solid and pulls straight out under load. None of them is acceptable as a scaffold tie.

So on a flint building the tying strategy is decided by where the brick is:

• Brick quoins and dressings — the corners and the surrounds to doors and windows are usually brick, and those are where a fixing can reasonably go.
• Reveal ties into window and door openings, which put the load across a proper structural opening rather than into the wall face.
• Box ties taken right around a structural element where the geometry allows.
• Raking or buttressed support where the elevation genuinely offers nothing to tie into — taking the load to the ground instead of into the wall.

That last option is more material and more labour, and it is the honest answer on some flint elevations. A quotation that assumes a standard tie pattern on a flint wall has not looked at the building.

The escarpment, and what the slope does

The Chiltern scarp rises sharply behind the town, and plenty of plots on that side have a real fall across them. A scaffold has to stand plumb and level whatever the ground is doing, which on a sloping plot means stepping the base — sole boards and base plates set at different levels with the first lift brought back to level above them — rather than simply packing one side up.

Done properly it is routine work. Done badly it is the single most common reason a domestic scaffold ends up out of plumb, and it is why a sloping plot is one of the things we most want to see in person before quoting.

The town also sits within or hard against the Chilterns National Landscape, which does not change the scaffold but can affect the planning side of the work it serves.

Approvals: one council

• Buckinghamshire Council is a unitary authority, so the same council handles both the highway licence and the planning and conservation side. That is simpler than Oxfordshire, where highways sit with the county and planning with the district.
• A scaffold standing on a public footway or road needs a licence under section 169 of the Highways Act 1980.

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

Much of the old centre is a conservation area with listed buildings in it. Scaffolding itself does not normally need consent, but the work it serves usually does, and fixings into historic flint and brickwork are very much a conservation matter. On a listed flint building, settle that before the scaffold goes up.

What we put up in Princes Risborough

• Re-roofs and chimney work — the staple, across both the old flint stock and the modern estates.
• Flint and lime repair — full-height access, long hire periods, and weather-dependent work that needs an honest programme rather than an optimistic one.
• Temporary roofs — genuinely worth their cost on a flint or timber-framed building. Water getting into lime-bedded flint over a wet fortnight does real damage.
• Commercial — shops and offices around the Market Square, trading underneath while we work.
• Domestic — extensions, loft conversions, rendering, replacement windows and solar.

The standards we work to

• TG20:21 — NASC technical guidance for tube-and-fitting scaffolds. Inside its scope you get a TG20 compliance sheet. A flint elevation with a non-standard tie pattern, or one relying on raking support, can fall outside TG20 and need a bespoke design from a scaffold engineer. Here that comes up more than it does on a modern estate.
• SG4 — NASC guidance on preventing falls while the scaffold is erected, altered or struck. It governs how our people work, not the finished structure.
• BS EN 12811-1 — the duty classes. A class 2 inspection scaffold and a class 4 masonry scaffold look alike from the pavement and are not the same thing. It is the commonest reason two quotations 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 its stability. On a sloping plot, settlement is exactly what those inspections exist to catch.
• 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 Princes Risborough job the number moves on:

• How much scaffold and how high.
• Duty class — what the work actually loads the platform with.
• Tying strategy — on flint this is the big one. If the elevation offers nothing to fix into, raking support costs more in material and labour than a standard tie pattern.
• Slope — a stepped base takes longer to set out than a flat one.
• Ground — new-build plots mean made ground and a bigger spread under the standards.
• Hire period — lime and flint work runs long, and on a highway licence the fee runs with it.
• Highway or private ground — a Market Square frontage adds the licence and usually a fan.
• Design — TG20 compliance sheet, or an engineer’s drawing.

The quotation states the duty class, the hire period, what is included and what is not. We would rather explain the number than defend it later.

Questions we get asked here

Around Princes Risborough

Nearby we have pages for Thame, Aylesbury, High Wycombe and the South Buckinghamshire towns, or see the whole of Buckinghamshire.