The building stock
The City's architecture is dominated by Portland stone: the Bank of England, the Royal Exchange, Mansion House, and hundreds of Victorian and Edwardian commercial buildings built in the same tradition — grand stone facades designed to signal permanence and trust for banks, insurers, and livery companies. Interspersed among them are Wren's City churches, rebuilt in stone after the Great Fire, and pockets of surviving post-Fire brick in the narrower lanes and courts that escaped Victorian and postwar redevelopment.
Because so much of the City's stone stock is commercial rather than domestic, the driver for restoration work is usually different from a residential job: a facade ahead of a lease renewal or sale, a scheduled maintenance cycle, or a planning condition attached to redevelopment of an adjoining site. The building is often occupied and trading throughout the works, which shapes how access and programme are planned.
What we do in the City
DOFF and TORC are both regularly specified on City Portland stone, following the same diagnostic logic as everywhere else — general atmospheric soiling responds to steam, established sulphate crust on sheltered elevations often needs TORC's additional shear action. What's different in the City is scale and access: many facades run to five or six storeys with limited setback from the pavement, so scaffolding, hoarding, and public safety planning are as much a part of the specification as the cleaning method itself.
Because a large share of our City clients are estate and property managers rather than owner-occupiers, we produce documentation — survey reports, method statements, photographic records — that can be passed to freeholders, insurers, and incoming tenants as evidence of proper maintenance. That paper trail matters as much in a commercial context as the physical work.
Repointing and stone repair on City facades tends to involve matching a wider range of historic mortar and stone specifications than residential terrace work, simply because the building stock spans several centuries side by side on the same street.
Areas we cover
- Bank
- Barbican
- Farringdon
- Liverpool Street
- St Paul's
- Smithfield
- Moorgate
- Cheapside
- Fleet Street
- Aldgate
The City of London Corporation is its own local planning authority, separate from the London boroughs, with a dedicated conservation and design team. Given the concentration of listed buildings in the Square Mile, they are experienced with facade cleaning applications and typically require a method statement and test panel results before approving works to a listed building.
Yes — most of our City projects run while the building stays in use. Scaffolding, access, and noisy or wet working phases are programmed around the occupier's hours where possible, and we agree a working method with building management before the site visit concludes.
Yes. Survey reports, written method statements, test panel results, and before/after photographic records are standard on our commercial projects and are provided as part of the service, not an extra. These are often requested by managing agents or incoming tenants as evidence of building maintenance.
Most commonly a scheduled external maintenance cycle, a facade condition survey ahead of lease renewal or sale, or a planning condition tied to works on an adjoining building. Unlike residential work, it's rarely reactive — City clients tend to plan facade maintenance well in advance.