Scaffolding Wallingford

Scaffolding in Wallingford

Wallingford is about half an hour from our yard at Enslow, down through Oxford or round on the A4074. It is a Thames-side town with a Saxon street grid, a great deal of Georgian frontage, and a floodplain on two sides. Each of those produces a specific scaffolding problem, and the first one is the least obvious.

The Georgian refront, and why it changes how we tie

A lot of what looks like a solid Georgian brick town house in Wallingford is a Georgian front on a considerably older building. Refronting was fashionable, and across the Market Place, High Street and St Martin’s Street there are timber-framed buildings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wearing an eighteenth-century brick face.

That matters because of what a scaffold tie actually has to do. A tie transfers load into the structure of the building. If the brick skin you are drilling into is a relatively thin facade, sometimes only loosely connected back to the frame behind it, an anchor can be carrying load into something that was never designed to take it. In the worst case you are tying a scaffold to a facade rather than to a building.

So on the older Wallingford stock we treat the question of what is actually behind the brick as part of the survey, not a detail. Where we are not confident, the answer is to avoid relying on through-ties into the facade: box ties round structural openings, reveal ties, and buttressed or raked support taking load to the ground instead. It is more material and more labour, and it is the right answer.

The floodplain, and what it does to the base

Wallingford sits on the Thames, and parts of the town are in the floodplain. For scaffolding the live issue is rarely flooding during the job — it is what the ground is like.

Alluvial river ground holds water and stays soft a long time after rain. A standard sole board under a standard spreads the load, but on saturated ground that spread may not be enough, and a standard that settles even slightly takes the whole scaffold out of plumb. On riverside Wallingford plots we plan for a bigger spread from the outset — longer or doubled sole boards, or proper spreaders — rather than discovering the problem on the second lift.

If the scaffold is going to stand through winter on ground like that, that is a conversation worth having at quotation stage, because it affects both the design and the inspection regime.

Approvals: who you apply to

• Oxfordshire County Council is the highway authority. A scaffold on a public footway or road needs a licence from them under section 169 of the Highways Act 1980.
• South Oxfordshire District Council handles planning, conservation area and listed building matters.

Two Oxfordshire specifics. The county charges weekly rather than granting one flat permission, so an overrun costs more in licence fees as well as hire. And Oxfordshire does not take applications from the public — the scaffolding contractor applies, so we handle it, but we need lead time and the licence usually sets the start date rather than our diary.

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 central Wallingford is in a conservation area and a high proportion of the older buildings are listed. Scaffolding itself does not normally need consent, but the work it serves usually does, and a conservation officer may well have a view on fixings into historic fabric. Establish that before the scaffold goes up, not after.

What we put up in Wallingford

• Re-roofs and chimney work — the staple, on everything from Georgian town houses to the modern estates.
• Repointing and facade repair — full-height access, often in lime, and usually a longer hire because the work is weather-dependent.
• Temporary roofs — worth their cost on a listed or timber-framed building. Once the roof is off, a wet fortnight does real damage to a frame.
• Commercial — shops, pubs and offices around the Market Place, trading underneath while we 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 you get a TG20 compliance sheet. A timber-framed building with an uncertain tying strategy, or a temporary roof, falls outside it and needs a bespoke design from a scaffold engineer. In central Wallingford that comes up more often than 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 most common 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 soft riverside ground, settlement is exactly the sort of thing 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 Wallingford job the number moves on:

• How much scaffold and how high.
• Duty class — what the work actually loads the platform with.
• Tying strategy — if we cannot rely on the facade, the alternative is more material and more labour.
• Ground — floodplain ground needs a bigger spread under the standards.
• Hire period — conservation work runs longer, and on a highway licence the fee is weekly.
• Highway or private ground — a Market Place job adds the licence, a fan, and market-day constraints.
• Access — a narrow Saxon street with nowhere to unload is a slower erect.
• 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.

Questions we get asked here

Around Wallingford

We cover the surrounding villages too — Crowmarsh Gifford, Benson, Cholsey, Brightwell-cum-Sotwell and North Stoke. Nearby we have pages for Didcot, Abingdon, Thame and scaffolding in Oxford, or see the whole of Oxfordshire.