Project Overview
Render cannot be applied through a scaffold that is open to the weather. On a main road it cannot be applied without containing the mess either. That is why this commercial scaffold was sheeted in shrink wrap from the first lift to the roofline before a single bag of render arrived on site.
Tower Bridge Road carries traffic, buses and a cycle lane in both directions through Bermondsey. It is not a road you close and it is not a pavement you take away. The access was the straightforward part. Everything around it was the job.
What the Site Needed
Three things had to happen at once and none of them could be traded off.
The rendering team needed a dry, contained working face at every level. Wet render and open scaffold do not mix, and a job that stops every time it rains is a job that overruns.
The junction had to keep running. Scaffold going up beside live traffic lights and a cycle lane means the erection sequence gets planned around the road, not the building. Lifts and deliveries were timed around it.
The footpath had to stay open. Pedestrians use Tower Bridge Road constantly and the neighbouring commercial units traded throughout. Closing the pavement was never on the table.
What We Installed
A full independent commercial scaffold to every elevation, sheeted in shrink wrap from the first lift to the roofline. The encapsulation did two jobs at once. It gave the rendering team a weather protected working face so the programme held regardless of conditions, and it contained dust and overspray so nothing reached the cycle lane, the carriageway or the shopfronts either side.
At street level the scaffold sat on a boarded gantry carrying the structure over the footpath, leaving a protected walkway underneath. Standards at pavement level were finished in high visibility yellow so nobody walked into them after dark.
