The grade II listed Watford Town Hall and Colosseum project brief for the windows was simple; keep the style and fabric of the windows intact but dramatically raise their thermal efficiency. Working with the designers Kendall Kingscott and English Heritage we established that vacuum insulated glass would be the only long term solution. This was due to the 8mm thickness of vacuum insulated glass units being perfect for steel framed windows and its long expected life span of up to fifty years. It was then just a case of what to do with the existing frames. English Heritage wanted to see the different options, so we carried out in-situ and ex-situ refurbishments, and also manufactured a new replica window. The choice was eventually agreed by the client and English Heritage to ex-situ refurbish the windows and fit the vacuum insulated glass units.

The challenge of this project for any window refurbishment company would be the sheer size and scale of the project with one thousand two hundred individual steel windows, each requiring ex-situ refurbish including major welding repairs, shot blasting, hot zinc spraying, powder coating, brass window furniture restoration, picture frame manufacture for each windowpane and the removal, boarding up, timber frame repairs, frame decoration and finally re-fitting. The mammoth implementation task of this project was the requirement to complete forty fully refurbished windows a week over a thirty-six week period. To compound matters, the existing SMW frames do not match any available hot rolled W profiles, so we had to manufacture new SMW sections to exactly match the many different existing frames for seven hundred and thirty four welded section replacement repairs. Every repair was completely seamless and once powder coated impossible to find.