My lunchtime walk was added to by the fire brigade practicing for an incident on Augusta Stairs, the last one of note being in 1967 when the cliff collapsed there, particularly embarrassing as this was just after they had had a major survey, saying that the cliff there was sound and safe.
This next bit is a game of spot the difference, just after I pointed out that there appeared to be some disparity between the plans passed by the council and the building under construction on Kent Terrace, the developer put tarpaulins over the front of the scaffolding there so that you couldn’t see what was going on.
I had assumed that this covered up them quietly changing the building to conform to the plans, however the tarpaulin has partly blown away revealing windows not quite where the plans say they should be.The pictures should expand if you click on them.
As you can see the top of the top floor windows of the new building there are supposed to be at about the same level as the top of Pier Castle, or the Belgian Café if you navigate by bars.
With the bottom floor being at the same level as the house next door and the top floor being so much lower I wonder what happens on the floor in between, perhaps this is a floor for dwarfs, perhaps in this politically correct age I should say the vertically disadvantaged.
The rest of the pictures are here http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/211/ the other main thing of note was work on the Pleasurama development, I will probably be corrected on this one but they seemed to laying concrete foundations, in the form of a load spreading pad, at the north eastern, Augusta Stairs end of the site.
Interesting to me as I assumed that the whole construction was to be the steel cage type supported on bored piles.
Perhaps there has been another design change or perhaps they are concerned about causing vibration so close to the cliff façade.
Perhaps there has been another design change or perhaps they are concerned about causing vibration so close to the cliff façade.
My guess for the concrete pad on the Pleasurama site would be a temporary base for a tower crane.
ReplyDeleteWith such a large development and poor access at both ends I would think a tower crane is essential
Readit could be I don’t see that they could load stuff to the tower crane from that end of the site without dragging it across the site first.
ReplyDeleteI don’t know if you noticed the foundations to the 1860 cliff balustrade, an odd structure that I can’t see quite how it was intended to perform, I expected the inclined front to extend to solid chalk and even so couldn’t work out how its thickness relative to height is supposed to work. It looks to be some sort of cliff support structure, weird.
I have doubts if the concrete pad reaches down to bedrock so suspect it probably is something temporary, it really is a pity that they don’t have some information about what they are doing available somewhere.
This isn’t what we were promised in terms of public information once the development started and hardly seems a sensible approach in terms of taking the town with them on such an important project. I have made some enquires and hope to have some more information by the end of the week.