BAFTA 190-195 Piccadilly
Ahead of London 2012, Aviva appointed Styles Façade Solutions® (formerly Thomann-Hanry®) to clean BAFTA’s Piccadilly home, UPS’s hospitality base for the Games. Decades of grime on its carved Portland stone made this a demanding Central London facade cleaning project.
Our Façade Gommage cleaning process, operated from a lorry-mounted cabin, cleaned the 1,000 m² façade without scaffolding and left the site clear each evening. This dry, solvent-free system gently removes soiling with ultra-fine aluminium silicate powder while preserving the stone’s patina.
In five days, our technicians revealed the stone’s original warm tones.
Solutions provided
And the BAFTA for Best Clean Goes To…
190–195 Piccadilly was designed and built in the early 1880s by E.R. Robson as the home and exhibition space of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours (RIPWC). Designed in the Free Renaissance style and constructed of Portland stone, the building is decorated with carved busts of leading watercolourists, including Thomas Girtin, J.R. Cozens and J.M.W. Turner.
The building was officially opened in 1883 by the then Prince and Princess of Wales (later King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra) with an international exhibition of nearly 900 watercolours. It was significantly altered over the years, including repairs after bomb damage during the Second World War. In 1970, when its lease came to an end, the RIPWC moved to the Mall Galleries in London and joined the Federation of British Artists.
The building was listed in 1972, and two years later the Society of Film and Television Arts (renamed BAFTA in 1976) moved in. Over the following years, BAFTA refurbished and upgraded the building, including constructing the Princess Anne Theatre, a 227-seat cinema.
Styles Façade Solutions® cleans BAFTA’s historic Piccadilly headquarters from a lorry-mounted Façade Gommage cabin, with no scaffolding required. The dry, solvent-free process gently removes decades of grime from delicate carvings while protecting the stone, and the vehicle leaves each evening, keeping disruption to a minimum.
Central London Façade Cleaning for BAFTA’s Piccadilly Headquarters
In the run-up to the London 2012 Olympic Games, the building’s owner, Aviva, appointed Styles Façade Solutions® to clean its Portland stone façade. The building was to become the central corporate hospitality base for UPS, the Official Logistics and Express Delivery Supporter for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Decades of urban dirt and grime had built up on the intricately carved façade and busts, making this a demanding Central London facade cleaning project that called for an effective yet gentle approach.
Using the Façade Gommage cleaning process, our team could clean the building’s 1,000 m² façade without shrouding it in expensive, unsightly and time-consuming scaffolding. This mattered because the building sits in one of London’s busiest tourist areas, so the site had to be cleared at the end of each working day.
Façade Gommage is carried out from a bespoke, lorry-mounted cleaning cabin, which can be driven away at the end of each day to avoid disrupting the building’s occupants and neighbours. It is a dry, solvent-free system that uses ultra-fine aluminium silicate powder, blown across the surface at a pressure of 4 bar, to gently remove the build-up of surface soiling while preserving the integrity and patina of the stone beneath.
Decades of Grime Removed in Just Five Days
The job called for an intricate Central London facade cleaning, reaching into the deep crevices of the carved busts, and our technicians set out to present the home of BAFTA in the best possible light. In just five days, the façade was cleaned to reveal the warm tones of the Portland stone beneath.
Our work on the building was later featured in the RIPWC’s book Then & Now, which looks back on over 200 years of the society’s history, including its years at 190–195 Piccadilly.
“I would like to pass on a huge thank you to the team on the ground from Styles Façade Solutions®. They worked quickly and diligently and did a truly fantastic job. The speed in which the clean was completed was incredible, and we are delighted to have the building restored to her former glory.”
Helen Kirwan, BAFTA Head of Facilities
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