08/12/2022
We’re excited to share some more information with you all on the first of our award winning projects;
The Woburn Abbey North and South Screen Walls in the Craftsmanship category.
The Screen Walls sit at the rear of the Woburn Abbey and were built in the late-18th century. But in the 200+ years since then, the stonework had deteriorated and could no longer be repaired. Some parts of the walls had been dismantled and others propped to stop them collapsing.
To restore the Screen walls we started by recording every detail, before carefully taking them apart. We marked up, cleaned and put aside every stone that was going to be reused, so they were ready to be put back in their original position when the wall was rebuilt.
The existing footings were removed and new ones put in, using 166 piles, 41 wind posts and over 40,000 bricks! In our workshops, we’d already been preparing the new Portland stone that was needed for six months before even starting to rebuild the walls. Each wall is around 85m long and 4m high so we used over 700 tonnes of Portland stone in total.
The laying out for the rebuild was really complicated because both walls curve inwards and fall in height by over 3m along the length of the wall. Although they appear to be, none of the stones are actually square, so every one had to be precisely cut to bring the wall back to its original beauty. The whole project took 3 years to complete.
Here are a few pictures from before and after the restoration of the screen walls.
Woburn Abbey and Gardens
