CASE STUDY
M
ost electrical contractors who carry out work in major theatres have first completed similar projects in much smaller theatres. But Playfords, which has its headquarters in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, has taken a different route. The first major theatre refurbishment project to which its staff have contributed was at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London. Playfords provided the electrical, mechanical and plumbing services for the Opera House’s Open Up project: a £50.7 million remodelling of a large part of the building. It has entailed a complete redesign of the Opera House’s entrance foyer, which has been extended by 50 per cent to create an 11,000-square foot social and cultural hub. This is now open to the public every day from 10am and includes a new café, a 250-seat restaurant, and public performance areas. The Opera House’s secondary venue, the Linbury Theatre, has also been upgraded, turning a studio theatre into a beautiful 400-seat auditorium with state-of-the-art acoustic and lighting systems. This isn’t a leap from obscurity to the top table. The firm first worked at the Opera House in 2012, successfully designing and installing a 3200A TPN generator distribution system that would allow the building to maintain power in the event of transformer failure. Having observed the way Playfords dealt with the space issues and other practical constraints of working within the building, the venue put the company’s name forward when the time came to find contractors who could complete the enabling and early works for Open Up. Playfords started working on electrical and mechanical systems for the relocation of the venue’s toilets in autumn 2015, then won the contract for electrical and mechanical works on the main project. Up to 50 Playfords staff
BY DAVID ADAMS
Curtain call For a firm making its stage debut, the Royal Opera House is quite a location to choose. But that’s exactly what Cambridgeshire firm Playfords did, working on not one but two projects and sub-contractors worked in the Opera House at various times between September 2016 and project completion two years later. MAPPING THE BUILDING The first phase involved identifying and locating the existing services within the building’s complex labyrinth. “We had to plan how to isolate and divert various items: sub-mains, cold water systems, supply and extract ventilation, sprinklers, fire alarms, stage systems and so on,” says contracts manager Steve Wood. “It’s a very heavily serviced building, mechanically and electrically. You’ve got multi-
292,350: THE NUMBER OF METRES OF CABLING REQUIRED ON THE PROJECT
discipline lighting and power trunkings, multiple stage lighting and AV trunkings, so there had to be a lot of tracing and diversion work upfront.” 3D modelling was then used to plan how the requirements of the project were to be met within the architect’s designs. A huge quantity of cabling was used to connect every individual speaker, spotlight and M&E service in the different spaces in the building. In total, the project required 292,350 metres of cabling. The complex plans for the way the services were to be routed around the new systems were also subject to disruptive change at short notice.
20 SUMMER 2019
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