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Heritage

Hatfield House

Conservation Works

  • No Mechanical Ties
  • Public Access Maintained
  • Protecting Heritage
  • Discreet Design

The Challenge

Hatfield House, a Grade I listed historic estate, required temporary access structures to facilitate a wide range of sensitive maintenance works. Internally, this included the restoration of ornate high-level architectural ceilings within the main house and outbuildings. Externally, refurbishment was needed across façades, roofs, and chimney stacks.

The primary challenge lay in creating safe and effective scaffold solutions. At roof level, this required use of the limited number strong points within the roof structure, of which some were deemed unsuitable for supporting scaffold loads. All works had to respect the building’s listed status while ensuring minimal disruption to residents and the estate’s busy programme of public events.

The Solution

Close collaboration with the estate management team and scaffold contractor was essential to coordinate works around ongoing estate activities, including high-profile film productions and public events that generated vital income. Every design decision was made with discretion, safety, and heritage sensitivity in mind.

Internal Works: Tube and fitting birdcages were designed to access high-level ceilings. Flexibility in setting the lift levels allowed full coverage of the ceilings, enabling precise and safe restoration.

External Works: Birdcages were deployed in the central courtyard to provide stable high-level storage platforms at eaves height, as well as support for lifting frames for raising and lowering roofing materials. To comply with heritage restrictions, no mechanical ties were fixed into the building fabric. Stability was instead achieved by carefully designing birdcages with favourable base-to-height ratios.

The Result

Externally, the courtyard birdcages delivered both structural stability and practical working platforms, offering ample space for material storage, scaffold equipment, and safe manoeuvring at roof level. The scaffold structures were designed to be clad in aesthetic sheeting during live events, allowing works to progress discreetly while the estate remained fully operational.

Internally, the tailored birdcage scaffolds proved so successful that they were re-erected several years later for a repeat phase of restoration works, a testament to their efficiency, adaptability, and sensitivity to the historic setting.