Tag: Case Study

Honouring a century-old tradition with a purpose-built solution

Some projects call for more than an off-the-shelf answer. When the owner of Old Alresford House approached us, they had a clear vision: to restore a flagpole to its historic position on the house and fly a generous flag in a style befitting one of Hampshire’s finest Georgian properties. What followed was one of the more rewarding commissions we have taken on, drawing on our full range of capabilities from in-house design and fabrication through to bespoke engineering and installation.

The Setting

Old Alresford House is a Grade II listed Georgian country house in the village of Old Alresford, just north of New Alresford in Hampshire. Built between 1749 and 1751 by architect William Jones, the house was originally commissioned for Admiral Lord Rodney, whose naval career fighting the French in the Caribbean paid for its construction. It is a house with a seafaring heritage in its very foundations, so the desire to fly the flags of England and Great Britain from its walls is perhaps as fitting as it gets.
The park, designed by Richard Woods in 1764, sits on the north bank of the Itchen Valley and the house itself is an exercise in Georgian restraint: brick with Bath stone dressings, three storeys, and a seven-bay frontage of quiet authority. Any addition to a building of this character has to earn its place and we were acutely aware of that responsibility from the outset.

The Brief

The customer’s starting point was a photograph and a piece of history. A flagpole had flown from the house in the 1920s and the owner wanted to restore that tradition, matching the style and position of the original as closely as possible. That much was straightforward enough. What made this project more involved was what they wanted to fly from it.

Rather than the standard 2-yard flag typically recommended for a 6m pole, the customer wanted to fly a 3-yard flag: a sewn St George’s Cross and a Union Jack, alternated depending on the occasion. That represents a flag roughly 125 percent larger than our standard recommendation for that pole height. Flying a flag of that size year-round, in all weathers, places significantly greater load on both the pole and its fixings. It was immediately clear that a standard glassfibre pole would not be the right tool for this job.

There was one further requirement. The pole needed to be lowerable without specialist access equipment. On a wall-mounted pole of this height, servicing the truckhead, halyard or finial would ordinarily mean a cherry picker. The customer quite reasonably wanted to avoid that, which meant a hinged base was essential from the outset.

The Challenge

Taking stock of the full brief, we were working with four constraints simultaneously: a heritage setting that demanded a sympathetic and elegant solution; an oversized flag that required a significantly stronger pole than standard; a wall-mounted fixing on a period building with its own geometry; and a requirement for the pole to be lowered by hand.

No product in our standard range met all four of those requirements. This was going to need a bespoke solution.

The Design Process

Before any fabrication took place, our in-house artwork studio produced detailed visual mockups of the proposed installation. Working from photographs of the house, we composited the flagpole and flag into position at the correct scale and proportions, allowing the customer to see exactly how the finished result would look against the facade before anything was committed to manufacture.

This is a step we offer on projects where the visual outcome really matters and it proved its worth here. Being able to see the pole and a 3-yard flag in situ on the house, at the correct height and angle, gave the customer confidence in the specification and allowed us to refine the proportions together before a single bracket was drilled.

The Solution

We specified a 6m glassfibre flagpole built to our 100% reinforced specification. The reinforced variant uses double the thickness of glasfibre, laid in a way that gives it twice the structural strength. The result is a pole capable of withstanding considerably greater lateral force, which given the flag size and the year-round flying requirement was the appropriate choice.

The reinforcement does result in a wider base diameter than our standard poles and this had implications for the fixing hardware. A larger hinged baseplate was required to suit the reinforced pole, along with a larger hinged baseplate mount. These sit on top of the reinforced wedges that come as standard with all of our reinforced poles, ensuring the load is correctly transferred into the wall fixings.

The wall itself presented its own engineering consideration. The angle and profile of the masonry at the mounting point meant that a standard single-bracket wall mount would not produce the correct pole geometry. We designed and fabricated a custom secondary support bracket, positioned further up the pole, with a smaller throw than the base bracket to account for the wall’s characteristics. The two brackets work together to hold the pole at the correct angle and provide the rigidity needed to support the flag load.

The pole was finished in gloss white, matching the appearance of the original 1920s installation as closely as possible and sitting naturally against the pale stone and brickwork of the house. A hinged base was fitted as standard, allowing the pole to be lowered to a horizontal position for maintenance, flag changes or inspection without the need for any access equipment.

The Result

The finished installation does what the best bespoke work should: it looks as though it has always been there. The gloss white pole sits naturally against the Georgian facade and the 3-yard flag flies with the presence the house deserves. The hinged base means the owner can lower and raise the pole without assistance and the reinforced construction gives confidence that it will perform reliably through the British weather, year after year.

For us, this project is a good example of what we genuinely enjoy doing. It required us to think carefully about engineering, to draw on our in-house design capabilities and to fabricate components that do not exist off the shelf. The history of the house added a dimension that made the outcome feel worthwhile in a way that goes beyond the technical specification.

Admiral Rodney, whose naval career was spent under sail and signal flag, would perhaps have approved.