At long last the building has begun to rear its head out of the ground.F or some 4 months to anyone visiting the site, seeing the photos or even peering through the gates, our project has seemingly been about witnessing a huge amount of digging, excavation, more digging, mud and concrete but not so much to see in terms of an actual school building.

Now Meccano Month is upon us.

I am happy to confirm this is not a strange new Department for Education initiative to get the children into engineering while they are still young!! n fact It is a term, very aptly coined by the Chairman of the Building Committee, Darrel Yawitch to describe the current stage of our building project.

When passing the by 261 Hale Lane over the last couple of weeks, you can clearly see a very large steel frame being assembled involving hundreds of pieces of steel that are being lifted by a tall crane into place. The steels are huge with some weighing over 6 tons each (that's around twice the weight of a large family car) and all are being bolted and welded into place at the moment. Onto them are going some 440 pieces of concrete pre cast plating that will form the floors and ceilings of the school.  Many of these plates are already going into place.  Some of you may have seen the lorries waiting to enter the site over recent days- each one of those is bringing upto 24 tons of concrete or steels onto the site.

It is really interesting to see this building starting to rise up and to see what will be below the floors and underneath the plaster of the classrooms, offices, the beis hamidrash, the hall and all the other rooms of our future school.
 
Mud Glorious Mud 02/10/2011
 
Work on the foundations and ground works continue apace as they have been for quite a while now.

This month has also not been the most pleasant for the builders on site due to the very heavy rain during the first half of January, but work has been carrying on the whole time.  Below are a couple of pictures from last week showing the state of the land (VERY MUDDY!!!). 

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Picture 1: Mud Glorious Mud
The second picture is interesting as it is taken from where Highfield House used to stand looking to the back of the site across where the shul buildings used to stand.  Interestingly, where the big yellow digger is standing and beyond is the area where the playground is to be built and you can see that the land for the playground has all been levelled now and obviously all the grass, weeds and bushes are gone.

The next really major work that is taking place, beginning in a couple of week’s time is the installation of the steel frame of the building.  

This is very exciting as we will be able to see, for the first time the structure of the new building taking shape.
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Picture 2: The View from the old 'Highfield House looking towards the playground towards the back of the picture.
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Ad me'ah ve'Esrim...

On Friday 26th November 2010 we visited 261 Hale Lane which looks entirely different to how it did just a few weeks ago.

The ground works and work on the foundations are proceeding at pace.

For anyone (especially blokes!) lucky enough to see it at close up- it is a really remarkable sight to see the amount of machinery and equipment working in such close proximity.

There are diggers, cement mixers, huge dump trucks, bulldozers, piling rigs and more.

So far we have had 120 dump trucks removing earth from the site.

The piling rig drives holes 60 feet into the ground into which are then added 60 foot metal frames which are then filled with cement.

120 of these holes will be completed in the coming days and on them will be built the school's frame and then the actual structure.
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Today was a historic day in the history of our school and for our community.

We symbolically broke ground for the rebuilding of our school.

The Secretary of State for Education came to Edgware to be our guest of honour and joined with other MPs, the Mayor of Barnet, Council Leaders, Councillors, officials, Rabbanim, Dayan Ehrentreu, donors, trustees, parents, staff, children, local supporters, friends, governors- 180 people in all.

It was a wonderful morning that started with some of the earth being turned over on the site and continued with a wonderful breakfast at the EAYC. 

The shul where we had breakfast looked beautiful, bright and buzzing with a wonderful atmosphere of excitement and celebration.  The children sung beautifully and confidently unfazed by the 180 people sitting right in front of them.

A very large measure of thanks must be registered for everyone involved in making the day so special- especially Rob Curtis and David Cowan for their huge work in arranging and organising things, to Mike Feingold for his practical precision and to Ruth Kosiner for arranging the wonderful food.

As the Secretary of State said, on more than 1 occasion!  “Yasher-Koach” and we thank everyone for a wonderful morning and many thanks to Mr Gove for joining us as our most honoured guest!!

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We visited 261 Hale Lane this morning, very cold and crisp morning and saw the site spread with 3 very large mounds of concrete, masonry and bricks. This is what remains of the old school/shul buildings.

These remains weigh in at a remarkable 1500 tons and are going to be used in the foundations of the new school buildings. None of it goes to waste.  

What is even more remarkable is that the approximate total weight of all the waste generated by the demolition was around 1600 tons.

So what about this other 100 tons? (and don't forget the average car probably weighs under 2 tons)

Well around 20 tons is metals- all of which is recycled.

Of the other 80 tons which includes wood, boards, glass, plastic and other materials- around 70 per cent is recycled.

Thus, all in it is around 25 tons (out of 1600 tons) that goes to a landfill

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