The Wilts & Dorset Banking Company Ltd was founded in 1835 and did not open a branch in Plymouth until 1885. In 1888 they bought Harvey’s Hotel and the site was developed into new bank chambers. The Wilts & Dorset Bank was acquired by Lloyds Bank in 1914 and served as a bank for them up until the 1950’s.

In 1888 the architect who had the task of designing the new chambers for the Wilts & Dorset bank was George Michael Silley of The Strand in London and on completion received many compliments. As principal architect, Silley had built or altered numerous buildings for the Wilts & Dorset bank. The Italianate style building was constructed on a base of granite with the frontage in richly ornamented Bath stone and Portland stone capitals to the fluted columns around the building. The contractor was George Shellabear of Plymouth.

In 1982 the Halls, Oxford & West Brewery acquired this Grade II listed building situated at the bottom of Royal Parade opposite Derry’s clock, and converted into the pub that we see today.

And it was during this refurbishment that we were contracted to carry out all the stone cleaning to the external elevations.

But that was then.

Jump forward to the winter of 2022, the pub was now owned by Miller & Carter, one of the UK’s biggest pub chains. They were concerned about the structural integrity of the stonework on the elevations and had a structural survey carried out to assess the situation. That initial survey had been carried out by aerial drone.

The drone survey highlighted several issues and these were issues you would normally expect to see on a building of this age that hadn’t had any maintenance carried out over many decades. These consisted of vegetation growth, spalled stonework, hairline cracks within the masonry, displaced stonework and loose or missing jointing. Once the initial survey report was written up, a scaffold was erected to further investigate those issues.

And it was at this point that we were contacted to carry out further inspections to determine the extent of any repairs required to those elevations. It turned out that we were going to be very busy as there were hundreds of items within those investigations that had to be addressed. Once those items had been determined, a listed planning application had to be applied for, outlining specifications and materials used and any repairs had to be approved by the local council as this building is Grade II listed. Once the approval was granted, we were then given the go ahead to rectify them. Our first day on site involved giving the main contractor, County Contractors based in Weston-super Mare, a hand with setting up the site. These requirements involved setting up site security fencing, positioning the site office, welfare facilities, storage containers and generators to supply power and everything else needed to create a safe working environment.

There were several different types of repairs required and each one was designated a specific repair specification. One of the repairs needed was to make good the areas where stress testing had been carried out to the stonework on the façades. Stress testing involves drilling a 12mm hole into the stonework to a depth of about 100mm and fixing a 10mm diameter stainless steel dowel with epoxy resin anchor which protrudes out from the surface by about 50mm. Once the epoxy resin has set, a rig is attached to the dowel to test its breaking load. This testing had been carried out all over the building to test the structural properties of the Bath stone.  First we had to core drill around each protruding dowel and the stonework within the core drilling cut back about 25mm.

Once that was prepared we were able to cut the dowel flush to the back of the repair hole without damaging the face of the stonework.

And when the dowel was cut back flush, the hole was repaired using a lime based Bath stone repair mortar. We had about sixty or more of this type of repair to carry out.

Another type of repair was specified for areas where stonework had cracked or where deep open joints had appeared. Here we drilled across the open cracks / joints at about forty-five degrees from one stone into the stone next to it. This is known as ‘Cross stitching’. These holes were 7mm diameter and drilled to a depth of 600mm. Once drilled a 500mm length of 9mm diameter stainless steel helical dowel was placed into the hole. With a special adapter attached to the drill these dowels were then hammered into place the full length of the dowel. The attachment also pushes the dowel 10mm into the hole from the face of the stonework. Because the dowels are of a bigger diameter than the hole drilled for it, as they are hammered in they bite into the sides of the stone creating contact between stone and the full length of the dowel. No resin anchor mortar is required as each dowel screws itself in like giant screws. This is a really good method for stabilizing stonework as it can sometimes be very problematic trying to fill these deep drilled holes with an epoxy resin mortar to grout the dowels in situ. These are simple to install and cost effective and once installed, because of the helical design of the dowel, they are never coming back out. They are also less intrusive because there is no need to take out and re-set the masonry so the only visible evidence is the small drill hole which is filled in with lime based Bath stone repair mortar. Every crack / open joint had a minimum of four dowels inserted two inserted each side of the crack. Some, depending on its severity had as many as eight.

These repairs fell into two categories depending on the width of the open joint or crack. Joints or cracks that were 3mm or less were  filled with a two part thixotropic resin adhesive and due to its fluid properties will seal cracks as small as small as 0.2mm wide. For the cracks and joints wider than 3mm we used a standard polyester styrene free epoxy. This is more thicker in nature allowing the vertical voids to be filled without it pouring back out. All epoxy fillers were left back 25mm from the surface of the stone and then filled over with a lime based Bath stone repair mortar.

This particular repair was carried out on the frieze midway around the building and was one of many that we had to address in this area alone.

We installed roughly five hundred of these fixings around the building.

Other repairs involved cutting back redundant lead pipework that was no longer required. These areas were marked out, cut back to a depth of 25mm and then repaired with a lime based Bath stone repair mortar.

repairs to small cornices etc