Canterbury Cathedral is one of Britain’s most famous, beautiful and historically significant buildings. Three years ago, an urgent £50 million campaign was launched to save it from ruin, and things are now getting done. Director of Works William Roe is charged with spending the money wisely to secure the future of this great church.
By William Roe
Director of Works, Canterbury Cathedral
Proactive planning and efficient project management have underpinned our work here at Canterbury Cathedral in recent times. When I first arrived in 2007, work was primarily done on a reactive basis. It was a case of ‘something is going wrong, we had better fix it’ – everything from a blocked toilet to a hole in the lead roof. Working more proactively has enabled us to go from concept, to feasibility, to design, to implementation much more smoothly.
We now run all the projects in the same way, using information gathered previously, and new measurements and reports, and feeding that back into the current program which ensures realistic timescales and budgets.
At the first stage, conception, we’ve got an idea of what we want to do and a rough estimate of the cost, which could go 50 per cent either way. We move into feasibility by qualifying and quantifying the risks. We try to get a very accurate picture of what we believe the costs will be before we start, including a value against the risks associated with such a unique project on an ancient monument. When you get to the implementation stage your cost estimate should only have five per cent leeway for the unknowns. You never get it spot on, but you look to get it as close as you can by eliminating the howlers early on and checking the detail as you go through.
Change control is also very important on a building like this as what might appear to be a minor change could have a major effect on the overall scheme of the project. Every change and its effects are recorded as part of the change control process. For example, if we wanted to change block A of a program we would have to change blocks B, C, D and E too, not just deal with block A in isolation.
The way we do things, you could argue that you are always going to bring a project in on time and on budget because you’re always reviewing those figures and keeping the important people informed at every stage.
There is no doubt that the most important people on this job are our own works team. We put in a lot of time and effort into training and development, facilities and infrastructure. Our team has skills tailored specifically towards working on ancient monuments which is an invaluable asset.
We measure their output against a notional contractor would cost us reassuring us that we are delivering value and giving us our yardstick for internal costs. In this way we can demonstrate a considerable saving of 10 to 20 per cent and often better than that.
Having a direct workforce is different to bringing in contractors. With your own people you need to be more aware of their needs and their own personal welfare to get the best out of them. It’s a totally different set of tools to dealing with contractors. At the Cathedral, most people are here for their own reasons, they have a passion about what they’re doing and you have to appeal to that passion.
Due to the nature of the work we do in the place in which we do it, we need an element of flexibility with contractors too. You need to have a good working relationship with contractors. We want a good job and we’re prepared to pay for it – it is that simple. In this financial climate, that means a lot. For contractors to have a good working relationship with an organisation which they know will not rip them off, will pay them on time, and has got a good supply of work, is invaluable. In return, we get fantastic service.
Using internal staff gives us enormous flexibility. If a job takes three months longer than we originally estimate it doesn’t matter to a degree. We are in a position to slide that work along. The work we contract out must be more rigorously planned.
Fortunately, we have an enormous amount of work, so it is quite easy to rearrange jobs. With so many different parts that need work, we can pick a four-year project like the Bell Harry Tower or a six-month project like a transept roof. It’s about different timescales and different demands for different areas.
In construction there is, of course, a distinct difference between new build and maintenance work. And while this is a unique building with more than 100o years of history, all we are applying here is the maintenance skill set. Our remit is ‘like for like’ which is very straightforward. It is not as if we are trying to introduce the latest technology or innovative materials, although there are some minor improvements we can make as we go along.
On the roof, for example, one of the biggest problems was the lead sliding down over the years with expansion and contraction. We increased the width of the batons to give us more surface area contact to give us better friction and less movement. Not a great deal, but enough.
We also removed cement the Victorians had used in repairing the pointing. The cement did not let water through so it came through the medieval Caen stonework instead, destroying it in the process. The water should come through the mortar joints, which you can always repoint. We replaced the cement with lime mortar, which is exactly what they did when they built it in the first place.
We can make minor tweaks like that to improve the durability, but basically it is still the same materials doing the same thing. There isn’t a great deal of improvisation. We don’t have to think about it too much, we just have to plan it and do it.
Although the Cathedral itself is exempt from English Heritage jurisdiction, there is still a strict approval process. We have a Surveyor to the Fabric and, like all Cathedrals, a Fabric Advisory Committee (FAC). This committee is regulated by an umbrella organisation called the Cathedral Fabric Committee for England (CFCE) who can call in any particular project if they want or need to see it, or our FAC might approach them for advice.
Local authorities trust us to get on with things to a certain extent, but this has come with a mutual trust developed over many years and a very good ongoing relationship with the city of Canterbury. They are kept informed through various formal and informal channels of what we’re doing, when we’re doing it and why.
Having a building site within a living, working Cathedral influences what we can do and when we can do it. We are restricted in the sound we can generate during services and that becomes quite severe at some times of the year like Easter and Christmas.
But it is just part of the way of life here. You get on with things – it doesn’t interfere, because you plan to work around it. Contractors who work here are made aware; it is written into the contract that they could be made to stop at very short notice.
The other issue is not having the whole building covered in scaffolding. When I first started we had three work faces on the Cathedral, but that has been cut down to two locations. It is the scaffolding that goes up and stays up for a long time that is the problem. The general feeling is that our visitors should be able to see more than is obstructed.
There are a lot of blurry parts about the history of this building and to be around when that is being brought into focus is nice. When you look closely at the Great South Window, which has presented major problems recently, you notice the repair work carried out over the years and begin to see there is a historical problem with that window. We will hopefully be the ones who sort it out so it is not a problem in the future. This is where new technology comes in, because now we have got engineers looking at it to discover the cause of the cracking, whereas before the masons would have simply gone up there and fixed it.
I know when this stage of work is documented and archived my name will be there as the Director of Works that oversaw this phase in the Cathedral’s life. That is something that you really can’t buy – it’s almost like writing White Christmas. The work we’re doing now is something that people in the future will be interested in.
We’re in a position with the £50 million appeal to not patch-repair, but to actually restore and put life back into the Cathedral. Hopefully with the roofs and the stonework nobody will have to repair them again for 150 to 200 years.
The three components of any project are time, cost and quality, and for us the emphasis is on quality. We have to get that right. The time and the cost are not just about the project today, but the next 200 years. We might be spending a little more now, but there will be no need to revisit it in 30 or 60 years time, or indeed 100 years from now.
We are not daunted by the scale of the task. We must focus on getting as much out of the money as we can. The challenge is trying repay every person who supports the Appeal by making sure we squeeze as much out of their money as possible with as little waste, with as much efficiency and with as much legacy-value as we possibly can.
