ROYAL GUNPOWDER MILLS

WALTHAM ABBEY

This was an exciting project to preserve a highly significant industrial site. Two thirds of the site is a Scheduled Monument and nearly half a Site of Special Scientific Interest. It also contains twenty-one grade 1 and 2* listed buildings. We worked closely with Event exhibition designers and the Landscape Architects, Stuart Pearson Associates, throughout. The project also included infrastructure work: extensive re-servicing and site-wide accessibility improvements and coordinating consents for English Heritage, the Local Authority, County Council, Environment Agency and English Nature.

We surveyed all three hundred buildings and structures on the site and prepared repair schedules before embarking on the restoration and conversion of six listed buildings to interpret the history of explosives manufacture from the C16th to the C20th. The centrepiece of the project was the creation of a new main entrance to the principal exhibition building within the Scheduled Monument.