PROPERTY

Deconstruction, not demolition

Kate Chisholm

IT's a bit disconcerting to open your blinds in the morning to discover that a cageful of men is being lifted on to the roof of the building opposite. It's weirder still to find yourself in that cage.

When Sainsbury's announced that they were leaving their offices on Stamford Street, south of the river close to Tate Modern, while they were being demolished and rebuilt, I was horrified. My fourth-floor flat looks directly on to the huge complex of sixand 12-storey buildings. What would it be like to live (and work) opposite a huge building site?

Not at all like the experience of the residents of St Paul's Churchyard, who were shocked one day in 1672 to experience what felt like an earthquake. Sir Christopher Wren had got so fed up with the length of time it was taking to remove the mouldering remains of the cathedral destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 that he decided to speed things up a little by using gunpowder, detonated by a gunner from the Tower of London. The terrified residents accosted the Dean, who forbade Wren to use explosives again, and he was forced to resort to that ancient device, the battering-ram, powered by 30 men.

Demolition today is not what it was. Explosives are very rarely used, and the thrill of watching walls come tumbling down under the impact of a ball and chain is only a memory. 'We've moved into the 21st century,' says Roy Gibbons of the National Federation of Demolition Contractors, established in 1941 to organise the clearing-up operation after the Blitz. Gibbons gets very cross if you mention demolition and explosives in the same breath. 'Explosives represent only a small part of the industry. We're all engineers, and there are very strict rules about joining the federation. These days,' he explains, 'it's all very high-tech. What we're doing is virtually reverse construction.'

Gone are the days when you can just send in a team of men with a heavy-duty hammer to hit the offending building to the ground. Demolition has become a highly refined business. Balls and chains have been replaced by hydraulic machines, which rather like a giant Magimix can be fitted with all sorts of attachments — munchers, shears, nibblers, hammers. Gibbons describes how cohorts of these mini-excavators are used to 'nibble away' at the building, column by column, wall by wall, floor by floor, edging their way from top to bottom.

The action all takes place behind a scaffolding barricade, swathed discreetly in a screen of reinforced plastic sheeting. 'It's to keep in the dust and the rubble,' explains Jim O'Sullivan, commercial director of Cantillon Haulage and Demolition Ltd, which is in charge of the project in Stamford Street and whose motto is 'It all comes down to experience'. He's always worked in demolition and believes that builders don't make good demolition workers and vice versa. A different kind of logic — and artistry — is involved.

At the Cantillon site office, O'Sullivan showed me the plans for another project — the £500 million revamped Broadcasting House in Portland Place, Wl. The original Radio One studio is to be pulled down along with the rest of the Langham Street building and much of the 'old' 1940s BEI — except for the art-deco facade — to make room for a new, stateof-the-art broadcasting complex, built around a glass-enclosed atrium that will be filled with cafés and meeting-places for BBC staff and the public. Before bidding for the demolition contract, Cantillon prepared an elaborate dossier of drawings, detailing every stage of the process — it's not quite da Vinci, but there's more than a touch of Brunel about the enterprise. The BH project posed a major problem. Demolition is noisy — very noisy; BR is the home of 'live' radio. How do you carry on drilling and banging and shoving rubble without interfering with the recording studios? Cantillon came up with an ingenious solution: to cocoon the site in a specially designed acoustic lining.

Back at Stamford Street the drilling starts at 8 a.m. and continues until 5 p.m. As with pain, I decided that the best antidote is to go with it. Which is why I found myself swinging high above my flat in a wire cage suspended from a crane.

At first I thought O'Sullivan was joking when he suggested that I might like to go up in the 'man-lift'. But when I arrived at the entrance to the site, the foreman presented me with a hard hat and fluorescent jacket and I realised that to retreat would be to lose face.

'I'm not sure I'm going to like this,' I muttered feebly as we walked towards the yellow wire cage. Having seen how it swayed in the wind as it ascended, my main fear was that I would vomit halfway up.

The gate was locked. the OK was given, and before I had time to think we could see St Paul's and the London Eye. In fact it was a surprisingly smooth ascent and not half so scary as those lifts that lurch and shudder as they speed upwards.

Looking down, I could see into the heart of what was once a bustling office, like a cut-out from a Look iNE Learn magazine. It was muddy; it was rubble-filled; and yet what surprised me most was the sense of order. Mounds of steel piping, glass, wood, broken concrete and bricks had all been sorted into separate sections, ready to go off to their respective recycling units — rather like an elaborate filing system. One mini-excavator was 'nibbling' away at the edge of the building, hammering away concrete pillars, while another scoured up the rubble into neat piles.

With strict limits on the use of landfill sites, as much as possible of the demolished building is now recycled. Ten rubble-filled lorries leave the Stamford Street site every day. New concerns about air pollution mean that water is continually sprayed on to the site in an attempt to keep down the dust.

The demolition at Stamford Street is scheduled to take nine months. The space is being reborn as week by week another floor disappears — and the view from my living-room window just gets better and better.