The Things Men Do With Ladders - number whatever.

 I haven't posted one of these for four years, but I couldn't ignore this.. what else is there to say?

How Many Offices Does ArchiFACT Need?

A recent job for ArchiFACT was an arbitration concerning a site in the Middle East with clients based on two different continents. No site visit was necessary for ArchiFACT, our report was based on evidence provided electronically and emails with the client.

The Arbitration process itself involved Arbitrators in three time zones, however the hearing involved very little travel for us. ArchiFACT’s expert travelled 65 miles by train and taxi from our Head Office in St Leonards-on-Sea to the lawyers offices in the City of London.

The hearing was conducted entirely via multiple video links and, if placed end to end, the total length of cables running between the pieces of tech in each of the individual offices of the arbitrators,  clients, experts and lawyers could well have been greater than the distance travelled by our expert.

The question arising was, does ArchiFACT, or indeed any consultancy, need separate offices in the North of England and another in the South, when almost everything except for site visits could be done sitting at a desk?

Drawing the obvious conclusion, ArchiFACT’s Yorkshire office is now closed. From 30 May 2024 all business will be conducted from our Sussex Office in St Leonards-on-Sea.

We can be contacted initially on any matter on:- 

01424 259597

07752 175973

via email – fact@ArchiFACT.co.uk.

9/11 Where I Was Not

 On our first and my only trip to the USA, Rob and I spent a week in New York intending to be total tourists, before moving on to visit friends Stan and Jen in Medford Lakes, NJ.

If our original itinerary had worked out, we'd have been in New York and would probably have done the Twin Towers and the Empire State Building on the 9th September. Once actually there, the more enigmatic Empire State came first, but might not have done if it hadn't been closer to our hotel. This budget hotel had roaches in the shower and smelled mouldy, but that was ok, it was exciting, we were in the Big Apple!

Luckily, because of various minor complications like Stan and Jen being on holiday in the West Indies and because BA's discounted airmiles tickets weren't available when we'd originally planned to go, we'd reversed the order of our trip and went to Medford Lakes after New York. We never made it to the World Trades Centre and I am eternally grateful for those minor complications.

Watching the events on live TV, while in the safe living room of Stan and Jen's charming log-cabin home, on the shore of the lake, was terrifying. None of us could believe what we were seeing. 

We spent half the day frantically trying to phone home, to reassure our family in England that we were safe. All the mobile lines were completely overloaded and landlines weren't much better. Eventually Rob managed to get an email through to his father in Leeds and asked him to please phone my mother in Hastings to tell her we were safe. We carried on watching the inadequate TV reports while Stan managed to get in touch with his cousins in New York, who thankfully were safe too. 

Just as alarming was seeing that there was nobody on top of this. Politicians were panicking and TV channels had no known pattern, no appropriate template to follow, on how to report an event of this magnitude which was actually happening to their fellow American citizens, not people in far off lands of whom they knew little and cared less.

The pristine, primped and botoxed newsreaders unemotionally reported on whatever garbled messages emerged from the authorities, (with jollifying adverts) between distraught and panic-stricken vox-pops. The reporters were without a hair or tear out of place and the requisite toothy grins were still plastered on their shiny faces, their body language mocking the horrors they were failing to report in any meaningful way.

There was no information.

Later in the day I went alone for a swim in the lake, it was peaceful and temporarily soothing.

                                                                           *

I don’t deliberately try to mark 9/11. The stress (mine), the horror (everyone's) and the fear (the victims), is something I'd like to forget, although I won't. The only events which have come close to affecting me that much since are the horrific Grenfell Tower fire and most recently the impossibly hopeless evacuation of desperate people from Kabul. The only earlier event to have the same effect was, as a child, watching reports from Aberfan. I felt I was one of those children, experiencing that horror.

Lighthouses at Dungeness 2

 According to this website, there have been not five lighthouses and Dungeness, which is how far my research led me, but seven. Two were low lights not the high ones I'd found. The first was constructed in 1884 in metal on a wooden base and included a huge foghorn. The second came in 1932 as a replacement for the metal structure which was by then, unsurprisingly, in need of extensive repairs. The 1930's structure was subsequently demolished to make way for the fifth high tower which was needed so the light wasn't obscured to the west by the nuclear power station.

Both the fifth high tower, which became an unmanned, automatic light, and the Dungeness nuclear power station  remain in operation today.

This article is fascinating, do read it! :-

Lighthouses at Dungeness - Romney Marsh, The Fifth Continent (theromneymarsh.net)  

Dungeness Lighthouses

 This is the Old Lighthouse at Dungeness in Kent.  Built in 1904, it is properly known as the High Light Tower and is 41 metres high. It was originally painted in black and white stripes, to make it highly visible in daylight, even in poor weather conditions.

The High Light Tower, 1904. Behind is the accommodation
 block built around the base of Samuel Wyatt's 1792 Tower.

Although called the old lighthouse, it is far from the original one. The history of lights at Dungeness is documented back to 1600 and probably goes back further. Dungeness is part of a huge strand of sand and shingle, many miles long, which stretches from Dymchurch in the east to Camber Sands in the west and is backed by the marshlands of Romney, Denge and Walland. At Dungeness the shingle forms a low, pointed promontory out into the sea which is extremely dangerous to shipping, hence the lighthouses.

The problem with Dungeness is that it moves. The sea, powered by currants and winter storms, is constantly shifting the sand and shingle eastwards, a process known as longshore drift. To the east, the town of Romney, once situated on the estuary of the river Rother, was left inland and became Old Romney. The port of New Romney, one of the original Cinque Ports, was also left behind and is now more than three kilometres from the sea.

There have been five light-towers at Dungeness. The first, probably a 10 metre high wooden tower illuminated by a coal fire, appeared soon after 1600, built by landowner Edward Hayman who intended it to be a 'tollgate' to earn him revenue as much as a warning to sailors. He was licenced by King James for forty years to collect one penny per ton from all passing ships. The light was poor and the whole scheme proved hugely controversial and difficult to manage. While people argued, the shingle moved.

In 1635 the tower was demolished and the Lamplough Tower, about 30 metres tall, was constructed in brick, nearer to the end of the shingle point. Disputes over revenues, the quality of the light and even the ownership of the tower continued for a hundred and more years. Ownership and overall responsibility for all lighthouses was eventually taken over by Trinity House in 1836. They today are responsible for 65 lighthouses around the British coast and as far afield as Europa Point, Gibraltar

In 1792 the third tower was built by Samuel Wyatt, with accommodation for the keepers in a circular block around its base. This superior light was powered by oil and used the new technology of parabolic reflectors. By 1862 another new technology was tried, electric light, though the supply was not up to the job and it was soon replaced by a much more powerful petrol lamp, its strength increased 100 fold with glass prisms.

By the end of the nineteenth century the shingle had moved again and Wyatt's 35 metre tall tower was replaced by the 41 metre, brick-built, High Light Tower in 1904. Wyatt's tower was demolished, though the accommodation block remained. Today the High Light Tower is more than 500 metres from the sea.


My 1966 photograph of the new Lighthouse. The car in the
foreground was our VW Variant Estate. Behind it are a Ford
Anglia, a Morris Minor Countryman and a VW Microbus.

The 1966 tower was built 450 metres eastward, away from the Dungeness Nuclear Power Station which had partially screened the view of the High Light Tower from the sea. The new tower is an automatic lighthouse, with an electric fog siren, owned by Trinity House. This 43 metre high light-tower, which perhaps can't strictly be called a lighthouse because nobody lives there, was the first concrete tower at Dungeness. It was constructed from pre-cast rings and the distinctive black bands were impregnated into the concrete rings. 

I first visited Dungeness Lighthouse when I was in my teens and the new lighthouse was brand new and had a circular ramp up to the base of the tower which we could walk up. The place was windswept, as always. I had just received a camera, my first, for my birthday - a Kodak Instamatic. These were amongst the first photographs I ever took, on the same roll are pictures of my family and our dog. So it seems that even then I was attracted to buildings as photographic subjects.

Word of the Day - Mullock

 Mullock could be a handy word when commenting on the activities of certain politicians, eg. those blithering mountebanks have made a total mullock of... (insert official title of latest politicians' balls-up)

Mullock - noun originally describing waste from gold mining activities in Australia. If you prefer non-antipodean words, try slag-heap.

Leaky Lockdown Chaos

Our house has sprung a leak. It’s probably been there for some time, but extended working from home makes these things more noticeable. Extraneous water was first noticed in the tiny cloakroom (and I mean tiny, think the smallest toilet you’ve ever seen on a plane) when a different leak was noticed under the washbasin, running down from the cold tap. The plumber arrived and fixed that, so we took up the vinyl sheet to allow the concrete floor to dry. There was black mould on the underside of the vinyl, which was consigned to the garden. Noticing the dark patch on the concrete extended under the door we pulled back the carpet and underlay in the hallway to reveal that floor was damp too. So were the doorposts, having swelled because they had been sucking up moisture, causing the toilet door to stick.

That was during the November lockdown. Since the washbasin tap was repaired, the doorposts have shrunk and we can close the toilet door. Everything else is still damp and in an attempt to trace this further leak the water to the toilet was turned off for a week, which made no difference. At least we could no longer blame that toilet. Next the panel behind the toilet was taken out to see if the pipework there was the source of the leak. It wasn’t. 

The vinyl in the next-door shower room was peeled back, revealing the chipboard flooring there to be dry by the shower, until we moved around the corner to the second toilet, where damp was suspected. The facts that the plaster was blowing off the walls, there was black mould and and the screws holding the boards down were rusting were a bit of a giveaway.

However even cutting and pulling the vinyl so far back that it ripped and will probably have to be replaced didn’t reveal the source of the leak. Neither did removing the bit of board below the boiler. So next up came the flooring screws, well some of them. The first eight or nine were easy. Why more than fifty screws were deemed necessary to control less than one and a half square metres of flooring is unclear. Most of them were rusty, half a dozen totally immobile. Naturally the flooring ran beneath the skirting so that was all removed too.

Below the chipboard flooring the concrete floor is wet, not merely damp. Below the boiler is a void, which is also wet. The source of the water is still unclear. So while we wait for the plumber the window in the shower room is open to try to dry it out, causing freezing air to flow through to the house. The flooring from the unusable shower room is cluttering the small study/bedroom, the tiny toilet is usable but freezing cold and the hallway carpet and underlay are still rolled back creating multiple trip-hazards on the way to the kitchen.

It’s been snowing for the past two days. The plumber is probably busy.