At the end of September I visited Iron Art at their base in Larkhall to find out about the project to restore the Edwardian-era Ladies toilets.
The loos were made from cast iron and glass, with 147 panels weighing three and a half tons. The structure has suffered damage over the years. Some of the ironwork is brittle and cracked. It appeared some people had been sleeping inside and setting a fire.
The Iron Art team dismantled the toilets and salvaged everything they found on site. The ironwork is currently in storage pending the go ahead to strip its paint off, so there’s nothing to see at Iron Art right now, but I had a chat with Andy Thearle and Martin Smith, to get the inside story on the work so far and how the project will proceed.
- What stage is the project at now?
The structure has been stripped down to its constituent parts and now we’re waiting for the BANES conservation officer to approve the method for stripping off the paint.
Once that gets the nod, it will be stripped and primed, then in two or three weeks it will be ready to go to the next stage, either here or somewhere else. We’re still making decisons about the best ways of processing it.
- How did you get involved in this project?
Iron Art got involved a few years ago, right at the start, when they were looking into applying for National Lottery funding. We were called in as experts to do a condition report and study it in a bit more detail to see how it was put together, looking for any evidence that things had been changed. Certainly the Gents toilet has been changed a lot since its first incarnation.
Then when the funding bid was successful the job came our way.
- Have you done similar projects?
Not toilets, but lots of restoration work. This might be a bit unusual, but our approach is transferable between different jobs, we just have to keep on board with the philosophy of the project.
The idea is to take it back to how it was when it was originally constructed. The basic structure will be the same. There are various minor repairs we’ll have to do, but nothing major. There’s a couple of panels that need replacing because they’ve been smashed.
We found another example of the same kind of Macfarlane’s toilets at the steam railway in Cranmore. They still had the original decorative spouts at the end of the gutters that were missing from Sydney Gardens. So we borrowed one of their spouts so we can recreate them. Martin has made a mould from it and cast it in resin. After chasing more detail into it we’ll send it away to be cast in steel.
- How long is it going to take?
Probably two or three months before we’re able to put it back in place, depending on how how long it takes to get the painting done. Also, we’ve got to get the base down on site.
We’ll have just a couple of people working on this. We’ve all got particular skills, but fundamentally any one of us here could be working on this project. Martin is mainly focused on the restoration side of things and will be doing the majority of the work. We can put extra people on it as we need to.
- What’s the most difficult part of this project?
Most of our jobs are difficult to some degree. That’s the kind of work we’re attracted to. I don’t really perceive any of this as being particularly difficult. Awkward, dusty, mucky — yes, but that’s nothing new.
It’s good to work on a complete structure. Until you start taking it apart you don’t know how it was put together in the first place. But we’ve taken lots of older things apart and it’s always the problem-solving aspect that we find really enjoyable. We just work out a way of doing it and get on with it.
