Abbey School Chester listed building refurbishment

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Abbey School Listed Building Refurbishment

Client: Read Construction
Customer: Abbey School, Chester
Service: HVAC Mechanical Services
Project value: £400k
Project completion: August 2021

Abbey School, Chester is located in Grade II* listed buildings dating back to 1754, in the heart of historic Chester, Abbey Square. It’s an independent special school for children and young persons aged 4-19 years with autism with additional learning difficulties and challenging behaviours. It is for both day and residential pupils.

Scope of Work

Our role was to refurbish the heating and ventilation to classrooms, common spaces, kitchen and bathrooms throughout the building in a Grade II listed building.

We installed roof mounted AHU’s and a cold water tank located in the basement along with a new ground floor plant room.

The boiler was upgraded to a new 100kW Vaillant unit feeding LTHW radiators in common spaces. In the kitchen, a new venting system was installed. The toilets and sanitary ware were also all upgraded throughout. Externally, we continued to follow the Grade II listing guidelines and installed new cast iron heritage drain pipes and guttering to match the period.

Contract Management

The project was managed by Senior Contracts Engineer Dave Gore. Dave has significant experience in challenging listed building refurbishments and this one as you will see below, presented some really significant challenges.

Speaking about the project, Dave Gore said “Abbey School was a very interesting project. We worked very closely with the conservation engineer to ensure we left the protected elements of the building completely untouched. This meant we had to employ some unusual tactics to move between floors, with a new void created, use of the chimney stack and even running the ducted fan coils behind false acoustic ceilings in each of the classrooms, to protect the listed covings.

It was a great project to work on in a beautiful location. The finished job looks great and despite the many challenges we’re very pleased with the results.