The old Waynflete Building is now almost completely down. After months of careful work on a tiny and awkward site, the Gilbert Ash team is close to completing the first phase of the project: the demolition.
Some of you may have seen the building gradually disappearing behind the screens when crossing Magdalen Bridge, but what you won’t have seen is the enormous mountain of rubble in the centre of the site.
As most of the demolition waste will be recycled, the team is painstakingly sorting through the debris, separating metal and concrete, etc. On such a constrained site, the process feels a little like trying to complete a sliding puzzle…while standing in six inches of mud.
Although the Waynflete Building will be gone by the end of the year, part of it will live on in the new Waynflete Quad. The crushed concrete will be reused as aggregate in the foundations of the new buildings. Magdalen is proud that every stage of the development has been designed to minimise environmental impact and maximise sustainability.
Archaeological investigations on the Waynflete site uncovered traces of a 16th-century building, as well as pottery fragments and a clay pipe. All finds have been recorded, and the excavation has been refilled. Because the site lies so close to the river, archaeologists suspect that much of the original material would have been washed away over time.
The same is not expected to be true of the higher ground under the York Place and St Clement’s Street buildings, which will be investigated once the demolition area is fully cleared. We’ll let you know what we find.
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