ON SITE
Invisible and Inaudible
Shaftesbury Avenue represents the beating heart of London’s theatre land. At its very end lies the Shaftesbury Theatre which is currently playing host to “Motown – The Musical”. Turn left onto High Holborn and you’re looking directly at the latest stage upon which Flatley and the Clifford Devlin team is performing. Not that you would know it. Façade retention works are notoriously difficult to spot as it often appears that there’s very little
going on and any demolition sound is generally contained within the four walls of the building. Even so, the Clifford Devlin site at 182-184 High Holborn verges on the invisible and the inaudible. In fact, if a worker hadn’t emerged from an innocuous-looking front door at just the right time, I might still be pacing up and down the street now. Beyond the quiet exterior, however, the site is a veritable hive of activity. A tower crane that plunges through the core of the six-storey building into the basement and beyond has been used to place a pair of Brokk demolition robots on the roof; and the tow machines are quietly yet methodically taking down the top of the structure piece by piece. Arisings from their work is collected and lowered to the ground by the same tower crane. Like the carefully choreographed theatre shows and musicals taking place just up the road, all the demolition works take place with practiced precision. And, given that the site is surrounded on all four sides by office buildings – some of them less than a few metres away – the level of disturbance created by the ongoing demolition works is negligible. In fact, it was notable that there was a business meeting taking place during
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