About the Project

Poundland 161 - 163 High Street Elgin

Left with an unstable overhanging gable party wall following demolition, Colin ditched the original plan of forming a deep excavation directly below it for the new-build’s foundations. By sitting shorter steel columns on a raised reinforced-concrete slab instead, he removed the collapse risk.

He overcame the challenge of bringing sandstone blocks weighing up to 800kg into a constrained high-street site by switching from large articulated lorries to vehicles with mounted cranes to lower the stone onto the very small landing area, storing it in bays. He also developed a scaffold that used moving trolleys around a cantilevered rail system to eliminate all manual handling from the stone installation.

Other notable achievements included devising steel shuttering for a concrete shear wall that was left in position to become part of the permanent structure. With the wall positioned in between the steel columns and too little space to use a vibrating concrete-compacting poker, Colin had special limpet vibrators attached to the shuttering to do the job.