Oakland Excelsior has recently won the order for a new lift in The Old Palace, Lincoln, which was the residence of the Bishop of Lincoln and is located on the escarpment just below Lincoln Cathedral providing an impressive view of the plain below. The client is the Lincoln Diocesan Trust who wished to convert the premises to office and residential accommodation.
The provision of a new lift presented several challenges, one of which being that the only available space for a lift is a redundant stairwell of unusual shape, being wide and shallow, and constructed in a mixture of medieval, Victorian and modern masonry. As a lift manufacturer, Oakland Excelsior was able to design a lift car to suit the existing stairwell, maintaining the minimum 8 person capacity to meet the disabled access standards. We were also able to provide 1100mm wide doors within the space available rather than the 800mm wide minimum requirement.
Also, whilst archaeological investigations had to be undertaken as the pit was being excavated, Oakland Excelsior co-ordinated a test drilling of the existing masonry to ensure the correct guide fixings are used.
Since the lift is to be installed within a Grade 2 listed building, the character was to be maintained, which meant that the existing windows in both sidewalls of the lift shaft had to be retained. This presented a further challenge as the location of some of the windows coincided with the ideal position of our guide fixings. However, with our extensive design capabilities and experience, our solution to this was to develop special vertical members to extend the pitch of the brackets such that they could be positioned to miss the windows.
The architect’s original proposal was for a machine-room-less traction drive lift, but this proved impracticable, as standard models were unsuitable for the existing site constraints. The solution was to install a hydraulic lift and utilise an existing redundant storeroom in the Basement as a lift machine room.
Oakland Excelsior is providing a full lift design and technical service to the client and the contractor to enable them to manage the building and electrical works associated with the lift project.
