Covert House lies behind a Victorian terrace in a backland site that can only be accessed via a narrow and relatively low passageway.The latter cuts through one of the houses on the main road and is shared with the adjacent Farmhouse. In these conditions one of the project's main challenges was gaining access to its site. As we had to excavate 5m into the ground, we needed to use large digging equipment. We outsourced a particular brand of machines produced in Japan, the only one narrow enough to make it through the passageway - after its door handles had been removed. Another problem was that the cellars of a neighbouring house extended beneath the passage. We couldn't pass over them with our heavy equipment and risk causing damage, so we had to build a temporary steel bridge structure to distributethe loads and get us safely from the street to the site.
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