3rd Gidea Park Scout Group Change Log

THE BUILDING THE ROWSWELL HALL EXTENSION

The next stage in construction was to build wooden shuttering around the foundations to contain the concrete that would form the foundations.

In parallel with this task, some people were working on digging out the driveway. As you can see Lisa and John are hard at work with the spades digging the ground down to road level.

By now the rough concrete that was laid over the mud has set hard.

Malcolm fit's the shuttering around the foundation.

Here the shuttering is almost complete.

Once the wooden shuttering had been fitted all the way around the foundations, polyethylene damp proofing sheets were laid over the rough level of concrete that lined the foundation ditches.

These would hopefully prevent any damp from getting into the proper re-enforced concrete foundation.

Because the soil around Gidea Park is so difficult to dig and because of the proximity of tree roots below a certain depth, a raft type foundation was used.

As can be seen from the above photo's, apart from around the edges, this foundation wasn't very deep. Even the edge ditches were relatively shallow.

To strengthen the concrete base, iron reinforcing grills were set into the concrete. On the main part the grills were just laid in place but in the ditches around the edge, the cages were bent into box shapes.

In the picture right, the first of these boxes is being formed.

Andy, Mr. Thorndyke, Malcolm and Tony bend the first bit of reinforcing.

Andy and Craig Denton create a box from spare parts.

When completed the boxes had one side that stuck out, this extended over the central part of the foundation.

The boxes were held in shape by twisting little bits of wire around individual bars. This was easy enough to do when out in the car park like the box on the left.

When placed in position, the boxes needed to be held together by twisting bits of wire between them.

Most of the twisting together of reinforcing grids was done on one particularly hot Saturday. The sun reflected back up on us from the polyethylene making the building site more like a sauna.

Small plastic discs were used to lift the reinforcing off the polythene so that it would be in the middle of the concrete base and not sitting on the bottom of it.

Also on this day, a wedding was taking place. To entertain ourselves we used to try and distract the congregation during the post ceremony photo shoot on the green. At this stage we had no power tools to help us and most of the work was below ground level.

Mark burns his back twisting cages together.

The last piece of grill is carried carefully in.

Once all the grilling was in place the building site was perhaps more dangerous than it was when we just had open ditches.

Before people could accidentally fall into the shallow ditches. Now anybody trying to cross the site could easily twist an ankle in the cage or worse still dent the cage.

You wouldn't think that this would be a problem in Gidea Park but you have to remember that we were building the new hall adjacent to the existing Scout Hall. For years the beavers and cubs had been used to playing on this land.

After work was complete on Saturdays, some time had to be spent making the site as safe as possible and fencing off all entrances.

| LAST PAGE | PROJECTS PAGE | BUILDING THE HALL EXTENSION CONTENTS PAGE | NEXT PAGE