FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Chapter 7 Building for the Future

was constructed in 1914, and has not been very well maintained; it’s falling into disrepair. There’s a disused railway station (‘Dover Marine’), an old hotel with associated walkways, a big jetty, and a breakwater. The Terminal itself is a large area, two hundred metres long and fifty metres wide, covered by a handsome glazed ceiling built of fancy ironwork and timber. Dover Harbour Board put aside £10 million for renewal work on the Terminal, and when the tender came up, they approved our bid, in no small part because of the work we had done for them over the previous four years. Work on CT1 started on October 1 st 2013. The hardest part of the job is replacing the glazing in the roof. It’s a listed building (a fine example of ‘Beaux Arts’ style, I’m told) and getting at the roof is not easy. We decided to construct a scaffold platform that we could move along the building on tracks, allowing us to do the work in sections. The scaffolding alone is worth well over half a million, so we paid attention to the weather forecasts when they said a big storm was coming; and it was a good job that we did. The winds that hit Dover on Monday 28 th October reached speeds of up to 105 mph. We had

The famous glazed roof of Dover Marine (the disused railway station) had to be protected from violent weather while restoration work was being done.

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