Conversion and Refurbishment

The Site
The site was a derelict, boarded up, brick. mill building on a confined site with shared boundaries on 3 sides. The building had a small street frontage and a narrow entrance gate, below the mill structure facade. Once through the entrance, the access road passed under a link structure into a court yard with mill buildings of varying construction, age, height and condition on all 4 sides linked together.

The courtyard was provided with a glazed roof supported by a suspended steel frame built into the surrounding structures. The boundaries were shared with adjoining mill structures with shared fire escape routes

The Design
It was proposed to provide the existing mill building with an additional floor and convert the basement of the main building into a car parking area.

A survey of the various existing buildings was carried out to confirm all steelbeam sizes, column sizes, wall thicknesses with trialpits carried out to establish existing footing details. Brick samples were taken for laboratory testing to establish mortar and brick strengths, whilst core samples were taken from the concrete floors to check for reinforcement and for laboratory testing to establish concrete strength.

The floor slabs were of filler joist construction and joist positions were located using detection devices. Areas of floor were broken out locally to confirm the actual joist sizes.

The concrete clinker infill within one the buildings was of very poor quality and in a very poor state, easily removed with hand held tools. It was deemed unsatisfactory for conversion and was eventually demolished and rebuilt.

The majority of steelbeams were dated around the end of the 19th century and the historic sections book was referred to establish beam properties. The steel and cast iron columns were also checked by this method with the wall thicknesses checked by carefully drilling small holes in the wall of the columns.

The brickwork was inspected and was generally in a good condition, however, the brickwork to parts of the top floor of the main mill building were showing extensive cracking. The cracking had occurred at existing column positions and also in the roof slab at a joint in the roof slabs. The cracking was caused by neglected areas of roof where water ingress had caused steel corrosion. This had in turn caused stress due to increased loads form the courtyard roof. The courtyard roof was removed and the brickwork was taken down to allow inspection of the steel columns and beams. These were either repaired and/ or replaced and brickwork made good.