Willmott Dixon is working on a £16.5m contract for Ealing Council in West London to refurbish the historic Acton Town Hall and Baths to house a range of leisure, community and civic services.
While preserving the Town Hall’s heritage, Acton’s former baths building will be replaced by a new three-storey building housing a 25m swimming pool and modern gym facilities.
In November 2012, 777 Group completed the four-month controlled demolition of the old bath house, while retaining the four-storey façade. The value of this subcontract was £975,000. The original baths were built in 1904 and in its heyday the facility was popular locally not only for its two swimming pools but also as a music venue in winter, when the pools were boarded over to become dance floors.
To enable the building to be updated, 777 delicately dismantled the old structure housing the two pools. Initially a compact 14-tonne excavator was used to create space on site for a 45-tonne high-reach machine to come in and bring down the roofs and walls. A labour force was also mobilised to soft-strip door frames, skirting boards and other furnishings from the Kings Rooms to prepare for internal re-development. A heavy-duty steel frame was constructed around the front portion of the site to preserve its façade.
A restrictive one-way road network around three sides of the building and a busy high street on the fourth side meant managing access to and from the site was critical. Delivering machinery and removing demolition arisings had to be carefully choreographed. Manned access points coupled with scaffolding and fencing kept the demolition safely separated from passing members of the public, while water-based adust suppression minimised mess.
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