Bringing down the House
Goody Demolition is in the process of dismantling the former Colonial Mutual Life headquarters located on the waterfront in Chatham, Kent, and has brought in its high-reach Volvo EC300E to head-up the process. Geoff Ashcroft reports.
Built in the 1990s at a cost of around £35m, Colonial House in Quayside, Chatham, has sat empty for the last few years, awaiting its fate. The red-brick fronted three- storey building, its basement and associated car parking is currently being redeveloped by Persimmon Homes, to provide a mix of one and two-bedroom apartments, plus three and four-bedroom homes within the Colonial Wharf water-front development.
Site clearance and demolition is well underway, and being handled by Aylesham, Kent-based specialist and NFDC member, Goody Demolition. But it’s been far from straight-forward, as the 32-week project has thrown up some interesting challenges along the way as site manager and high-reach machine operator, Paul Hougham,
explains. “The building is a heavily reinforced concrete structure with an outer brick skin and a steel roof,” he says, “and given the amount of steel buried within the concrete, it was probably engineered to withstand an earthquake.”
The on-site team have been so surprised by the amount of steelwork within that a friendly sweepstake is taking place among the Goody team. Best estimates of what the building is likely to yield are already in excess of 4,000 tonnes of steel.
“This is one of those buildings that was never going to fall down, nor come apart easily,” he says. “And this job is a meticulous and methodical process of dismantling that demands decent fire-power.”
CONTINUED OVERLEAF a
The building’s many external elevations and complex diversity of roof structures is proving an interesting project for Goody Demolition
36 THE VOICE MAGAZINE No 33 2018
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