Skinners’ Hall
Skinners’ Hall
Skinners’ Hall is home to the Workshipful Company of Skinners, one of the great twelve livery companies in the City of London. The building dates back to the mid 17th century with the basement surving the Great Fire of London. The building is Grade I listed and classified a Scheduled Ancient Monument.
The building has undergone a once in a generation refurbishement. Historic interiors have been reorganised, the basement has now been opened up for public use and a new pavillion has been introduced to the roof terrace. The area of the building rebuilt in the 1980s has been completely reconfigured.
Section
The existing building pre-dates the industrial revolution and modern building services movement. It was originally designed to work without electricity, so the building has good genes with large sash windows and tall ceilings to maximise natural light and natural ventilation.
These important features of the historic building are retained along with an approach to sensitivity upgrade the thermal performance of the original building fabric.
All existing windows across the hall have been refurbished and fitted with draught seals. The windows in the Dowgate Range are being reglazed with slim Histoglass products, improving the thermal and acoustic performance with respect to their historic status. All existing window shutters have been refurbished and brought back into working order to provide sun protection and a secondary insulation layer at night. New windows will match the Georgian originals but perform to a much higher thermal standard. A new pavilion is triple glazed with exterior deployable solar control screens.
Over its life the building has had a process of periodic retrofitting of mechanical and electrical systems. When we first surveyed the building in 2017, the services were a mix of installations from different time periods, incoherent and mostly at the end of their life.
All the existing building services have been decommissioned, stripped out and are being replaced with more modern equivalents. The buildings services have been rationalised and reorganised. New more efficient distribution routes will utilise existing pockets in the building fabric for new risers, removing existing pipework from intruding on historic areas.
Rooms that can be naturally ventilated are retained to respect the original character of the building. The Court Rooms will continue to be naturally ventilated with sensitive artworks encased in conditioned frames to enable their prolonged conservation, without needing to control the rooms to close temperature and humidity bounds which would be an energy intensive process.
The Old Library
The Old Court Room
The Dowgate offices can still be naturally ventilated, but the addition of mechanical ventilation boost fans located inside existing chimneys allows the windows facing the noisy and polluted Dowgate Hill to be closed when necessary. The top floor apartments are provided with heat recovery ventilation systems which allow controlled fresh air with all windows closed.
Room Fan Coil Unit Integration
Rooms that can be naturally ventilated are retained to respect the original character of the building. The Court Rooms will continue to be naturally ventilated with sensitive artworks encased in conditioned frames to enable their prolonged conservation, without needing to control the rooms to close temperature and humidity bounds which would be an energy intensive process.
A key part of the project is to prepare the building for a zero carbon future and the main intervention is the switch from gas heating and cooking to all electric operation utilising modern heat pumps and induction appliances. This single intervention alone will reduce the halls overall carbon emissions by at least 50% when it reopens in 2024.
A new external roof top enclosure has been carefully designed to visually and acoustically screen air source heat pumps which provide all space heating and hot water production for the building.
Air Source Heat Pump Enclosure
New pavilion with heat pump enclosure in the background
The art lighting was tested A new external roof top enclosure has been carefully designed to visually and acoustically screen air source heat pumps which provide all space heating and hot water production for the building.
The return air ceiling void
Many parts of the existing basement had insufficient fresh air. The refurbished basement is provided with all new efficient mechanical ventilation systems with supplementary cooling for the vaults event spaces.
Basement Vaults - Mechanical Ventilation
