The state of the school building today

Building the school

The school was built in three phases:

	This was the first version of the school in 1904, stone built, with a slate roof:
	They added gable wings on either end of the building between 1918 and 1929, built with 18 “ thick solid walls.
	This is the present layout of the school built in the 60s or 70s.
	This is the existing plan of the building and notice that it has an internal area of nearly 500 m2.        It sits in a 2 acre plot of land

The present state of the school

Since the last phase of building, it looks as if there has been very little maintenance to the building and it is somewhat dilapidated. It now has two serious problems:

1. Some of the rooms are very damp.
2. The heating bill is enormous – about £10,000 each year.

And several minor problems:

1. The flat roof over the post war classrooms is probably original; it doesn’t leak but it needs to be recovered.
2. Some of the windows are in poor condition.
3. The building has external finishes which will be expensive to maintain.
4. The building appears too large for the current rate of usage.

However, we should not be too pessimistic! We have asked several builders of pre-fabricated community centres for quotations on their building costs, one of which was Benfield ATT Group. Michael Benfield visited our school in December 2019 and volunteered this report:

Taking advantage of the relatively dry weather I visited yesterday. Superficially the structure looks sound and the building very spacious. It would be a pity to pull it down, especially as you already have good spacious parking. Subject to positioning of internal walls it should be adaptable to your requirements.

The next webpage describes how we can fix the two most serious problems.

Fixing the damp and reducing the heating bills