Refurbished Dockside Crane Honours Maritime Heritage
The protective coatings specialist Pyeroy Group has won a new contract to refurbish a 50 year old dock side crane as part of the £ 100 million Rochester Riverside regeneration project along the River Thames in Kent UK.
Pyeroy’s £100,000 segment will see the contractor shot blast and repaint the dismantled crane before it is reassembled on the quayside to form a permanent memorial to Rochester’s industrial maritime heritage.
Rochester Riverside, which is being overseen by regional development agency SEEDA and the local Medway Council, will see 74 acres of the Thames Gateway transformed into a new mixed used development of housing, retail and leisure facilities. This will include 2,000 new houses, cafes, bars, offices, shops, hotels, parks, a new two mile riverside walk and links to Rochester’s historic city centre.
The decommissioned 10 ton lift capacity crane, originally built and installed at the docks in 1954 for unloading cement for the nearby cement works, is set to be a central feature of the scheme when restoration is completed next year.
The work will see a team of contractors working on the 200 ton, five piece structure onsite within a tented environment to prevent lead flakes and contaminated water from escaping to the surrounding locality.
Once completed, the site will be cleaned, restored and the waste disposed off in a licensed landfill site. The project is expected to take six weeks to complete.
Pyeroy’s painting operations were recently expanded with the acquisition of the Scotland based Industrial Painting Division of Palmers, enabling the company to claim to be the UK’s largest independent specialist painting contractor
