• St. John's Home
• Picture Pages Intro
• A poet visits
• St. John's Under Snow
• The Lord Mayor Visits
• Science Discovery Day
• Venice Art Trip
• Yr7 Normandy Trip
• Serre Chevalier Ski Trip
• Fireworks Evening
• Summer Term 1999
• Building Work II
• Pila Ski Trip
• Autumn Term Roundup
• Building Work I
• Night Under Canvas
• Summer Fun Day 1998
• Junior Sports Day
• 1998 U.S. Ski Trip
• Helicopter Visit
• A Cricket Match
• Easter Term Roundup
• First Match for the U8s
• Summer Concert
• Paris Art Trip
• Saracens Visit
• End of Year
• A hectic half a term
• 1997 U.S. Ski Trip

This is the second story on the website to do with our new building. The previous story covered a lot of the preliminary work as well as the earth moving, digging and concrete pouring that went into the foundations and took up half of the summer break.

A misty morning early in the Autumn Term and the flooring slabs are being laid for what will be the new Music Room. This shot also gives a good idea of the layout of the new building in relation to the Main Building.

Here's that flooring slab job finished. Each of the slabs was the width of the building in length and if you're wondering how they got them inside the framework of the hall it was by lowering them in very gingerly. That is not the south end of the building you can see in the bottom righthand corner of the photo. Rather, the building is split level and continues down the hill.

The building site has been very securely fenced off but, most sensibly, not with boarding but with these see-through barriers so that we can see what's going on. This first or second form class is sketching the site.

With the flooring slabs in, the work on block and brick laying became the main activity on the site. As you can see, what seems to be a brick wall on the outside is actually made up of three layers: concrete blocks and bricks with silvered insulation board as the filling in the sandwich. Those things sticking out of the insulation board are aluminium ties that join the two walls together and stop them from sagging away from each other.

Things have moved on in the the Autumn Term - but notice that the leaves are still very much on the trees, which is a measure of how fast QDM, the firm doing the building, has been working. The flooring slab of pre-cast concrete that is being lowered will be part of the floor of the new Art room. The two men conferring on the right of the picture are standing on the stage of the hall. The floor on the extreme left belongs to the new ICT (i.e., computers) room and below it is the new DT room.

Notice how the building has grown, how the trees have turned golden and how the First and Second Form building has disappeared from view. Just to be helpful I've labelled the different areas of the new building. Over the weeks I've taken quite a few shots from this vantage point and so if you want to see a building grow before your eyes, this is your chance. Be warned though that there are six images on this page, each of about 30K in size.

You're free to provide your own "stairway to heaven" type captions if you wish. This flight of stairs is now at the north end of the building and is part of the stairway connecting the music and art departments.

A series of extremely large lorries delivered the roofing timbers already made up into their triangular sections. They were assembled into these sections and then a crane turned up for the day to get them up onto the roof.

As you can see here, on top of the rafters goes insulation board which is held down by vertical battens. On top of that is laid black building paper held down by horizontal battens to which the tiles are then nailed down.
This photo must have been taken in early December. Now (early February) the exterior of the building is complete and so work is proceeding on finishing the interior of the building.

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