ON SITE

Stolen Property

If someone offers you some cheap four-by-two in the pub tonight, please don’t take him up on it, but pass his name on to your local police. I had heard mutterings about how big a deal theft from building sites is, but now I know for myself. I presume someone had been watching as our site developed, so on Sunday morning I came to church to find a panel of Heras fencing alarmingly overhanging the steps down to the vestry. On investigating, I found that several panels of fencing had been lifted from their bases and heaved up to allow access to the building materials stored behind the fence. A couple of (vast) sheets of plywood were sitting disconsolately in the grass. A churchwarden and I manoeuvred the fencing back into position, as best we could, but one panel was horribly twisted; it had been chained to our railings, and that fixing had held secure, but then the whole thing had been rotated around that. I texted the Site Manager to let him know. This morning he told me that there had been a quantity of timber stored there which had totally vanished. Ironically, it’s the timber they are using to build the proper hoarding around the site to make it more secure. You can see through Heras fencing, you see, and be tempted, whereas a nice old-fashioned solid hoarding doesn’t present the same temptations.

Budding Banksies

The drawback with a proper hoarding is that it provides a fine blank canvas for graffiti artists, and indeed our new hoarding acquired its first graffiti at the weekend. Our strategy there is to fix up on the hoarding panels that have been painted by local people. At the Westbourne Festival, at the beginning of July, we had a workshop for local young people, which was led by a graffiti artist, creating all sorts of strange images to go up on the hoarding. The artist came back later and finished it all off, and just now the panels are waiting to be fixed onto the hoarding. It will be a lot more interesting than a blank hoarding, and the hope is that what is essentially graffiti art should not attract further graffiti. I hope it works.

Enter the Scaffolders   

Today, things are getting very serious. The scaffolders are on site, starting to erect the exterior scaffolding (which needs to be done before the hoarding is finished). This is a trivial job compared to the interior scaffolding, which is going to take weeks to put up. I have to say that they are very quiet at the moment, certainly compared to other scaffolders of whom I’ve had experience; everyone involved in the construction industry regards scaffolders as a breed apart, and they seem to do their best to live up to expectations.

Organ Builders Too

The organ builders have also turned up to dismantle a few pipes, take down the ornamental pipes, and seal up the opening of the organ chamber that contains the main banks of pipes. Getting them here has been a bit of a pantomime, as they and the contractors exchanged mutually uncomprehending messages. They seemed very resistant to the idea that they had to have proper protective clothing since it was now a building site, but they’ve clearly been allowed on site, so I presume they came with the proper gear after all. I now need to retrieve from them the three sets of keys to the church that they have held onto; they like to have their own keys so that they can come and go at their convenience, but that won’t work in the future. In the short term, we need to make sure that access to the site is controlled so that we don’t invalidate our insurance, but when the work is done, the church will be in use far more, and it won’t be possible for them to turn up to tune the organ when it suits them, as they have been accustomed to do. They will need to arrange visits properly with the building manager. Organ tuners get very proprietorial about the organs that they look after, and I can understand that, but they do sometimes make you feel that they are doing you a favour by allowing you to use the organ for something as trivial as accompanying services.

Furniture To The Third World

Meanwhile the school’s dining tables are being removed. We have had to reconfigure the school kitchen slightly to enable us to build the new wing, but that has reduced the space in which to store the dining tables. After struggling with various expensive options, our architect, with a brilliant piece of lateral thinking, discovered that more efficient tables were available. So now the new tables have arrived, and the old tables (with integral seating) are going to be shipped to Africa by a charity that specialises in this sort of thing. With them are going a load of church chairs, not nice enough for any congregation here, but still functional. I had hoped they would go to Jamaica (as we have a number of Jamaicans living locally) but it seems they’ve finished that project, and so they will be going somewhere in Africa. We are desperate to know where.