Scaffolding Wendover

Scaffolding in Wendover

Wendover is about forty minutes from our yard at Enslow, round through Thame and Aylesbury. It sits in the gap where the Chiltern escarpment breaks, and its High Street has something we do not meet often in Oxfordshire: a run of timber-framed buildings, some of them jettied.

Jettied buildings, and a scaffold that has to get wider as it climbs

A jetty is where an upper floor oversails the one below it — the first floor projects out over the ground floor, carried on the ends of the floor joists. It was a standard way of building in timber in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, and you can see it along Wendover’s High Street and Aylesbury Road.

It creates a problem most scaffolders meet rarely. A normal scaffold stands plumb, in a single plane, a fixed distance off the wall. A jettied building does not present a single plane: the wall face steps outwards as you go up. Stand the scaffold to clear the first floor and the ground-floor lift is uselessly far from the wall. Stand it to suit the ground floor and the upper lift fouls the jetty.

The answer is to build the scaffold in two planes — the lower lifts set close to the ground-floor face, then the scaffold stepped out above the jetty line to follow the overhang, with the transition properly braced rather than improvised. It takes longer to set out, uses more fittings, and genuinely needs someone to look at the building first.

The other half of the problem is tying. An exposed timber frame with lime-rendered or brick-nogged panels gives you very little to fix into: you do not drill the frame, and the panels between the timbers are not structural. So ties go round the frame where the geometry allows, into window reveals, or the load goes to the ground on rakers instead. On a listed timber-framed building that is the starting assumption, not a fallback.

Approvals: one council

• Buckinghamshire Council is a unitary authority, so the same council deals with both the highway licence and the planning and conservation side. Simpler than Oxfordshire, where highways sit with the county and planning with the district.
• A scaffold 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.

The old centre is a conservation area with a substantial number of listed buildings, and the town sits within the Chilterns National Landscape. Scaffolding itself does not normally need consent; the work it serves usually does, and fixings into a historic timber frame are very much a conservation matter. On a listed building in Wendover we would want that settled before anything goes up.

What we put up in Wendover

• Timber-frame repair and re-roofing — the specialist end of the work here, where the scaffold design matters as much as the scaffold.
• Temporary roofs — close to essential on an exposed timber frame. Water in a frame over a wet fortnight does damage you cannot undo.
• Re-roofs and chimney work — the staple across both the old core and the modern estates.
• Lime render and panel repair — long hire periods and weather-dependent, so the programme needs to be honest.
• Commercial — shops, pubs and offices, trading underneath while we work, with the public route protected.
• 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 the scaffold comes with a TG20 compliance sheet. Non-standard geometry, an unusual tie pattern or a temporary roof puts you outside it and into a bespoke design from a scaffold engineer. If a quotation does not say which you are getting, ask.
• 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.
• 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 Wendover job the number moves on:

• How much scaffold and how high.
• Duty class — what the work actually loads the platform with.
• Geometry — a jettied elevation needs the scaffold built in two planes, which is more fittings and more setting-out time than a flat wall.
• Tying strategy — on an exposed frame, taking the load to the ground on rakers costs more than a standard tie pattern.
• Slope — a stepped base on the scarp side takes longer to set out.
• Hire period — conservation work runs long, and the highway licence runs with it.
• Highway or private ground — a High Street frontage adds the licence and usually a fan or walkway.

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

Questions we get asked here

Around Wendover

We cover the surrounding villages too — Halton, Weston Turville, Aston Clinton, Great Missenden and Stoke Mandeville. Nearby we have pages for Aylesbury, Princes Risborough, Thame and High Wycombe, or see the whole of Buckinghamshire.