You can trust in us to restore your building or structure to perfect condition

On one of London’s busiest traffic islands outside Kings Cross Station, stood a once beautiful building, known as the Lighthouse Building, which had sadly fallen into dereliction. For years it had been an eyesore left to ruin, providing a home for hundreds of pigeons and many unruly buddleia trees. In the summer of 2015 (as part of a wider redevelopment of the Kings Cross area) we were commissioned to assist with the restoration of this unusual building. Our work focused on the replacement of the many pretty window surrounds, pediments and dormers. Other components included the rooftop arched balustrading, bracketed cornice and corbels, right down to the 3 metre high pilasters separating the shop fronts. These pilaster units were painstakingly restored from the originals, recreating the intricate carvings. Each unit contains a lion’s face, a four leaved flower and a pulvinated corbel plinth set upon rolled moulded square shafts. The renovation also included a new armadillo roof and rear extension and is now almost open for business. One important point to note is that some of our dormer units required specialist rubber isolation fixings underneath them. Why? The rubber isolation fixings are imperative because, although handy for the tube, the Lighthouse Building’s basement is only about 1 metre above the underground tunnel.

The two halves of John Nash’s magnificent semi circus at the top of Portland Place are an iconic site to behold, originally built around 1812-1821. However, the west side was bombed during World War Two and hurriedly rebuilt in the 1950s to match it’s elegant stuccoed neighbour. As Sir Michael Caine never said, ‘not a lot of people know that’. In 2018 we were very pleased to be involved with the massive rebuilding and regeneration project that followed. Our works were mainly to produce the large structural lintols, both arched and straight, that would form the window openings. We also manufactured the decorative first and top floor balustrading, comprising of plinth, bottles, copings and dia blocks to match the existing façade.

We attended site to survey these ornate Capitols, where we found that, once the several layers of paint were removed, there was serious corrosion in the iron brackets fixing them to the wall. The Capitols were made from buff terracotta and held together with the iron cramps, which had rusted and expanded, causing the substrate to crack and fail. As they were literally falling away in our hands, we advised they be removed and transported to our workshop, where we could restore them in safety. The terracotta components were individually sculpted and restored before we could reassemble the entire sections and produce new silicone moulds. We cast the new pieces in our own reconstituted stone mix, adding some coloured sand to achieve the buff effect – even though the new capitols were to be painted. They are now back on the building, firmly attached and reinforced with stainless steel fixings, for generations to walk under without fear.