TONY CLEARY, SENIOR STRUCTURAL SUPERVISOR, RINGWAY LTD - MAIN CONTRACTOR FOR TRANSPORT FOR LONDON
CENTRAL LONDON SUBWAYS
You can shut your eyes to graffiti and posters in inner cities - but nothing invades the senses like dirty, smelly subways and underpasses. In Central London, we maintain 55 subways for Transport for London (TFL).
From Hyde Park Corner and Marble Arch to Blackfriars and the Embankment (and dozens of sites in between), we're on-site or on-call to ensure London's subways are clean and safe.
That includes cleaning dirt and grime from the walls and floors, repairing tiles and pavors, removing rubbish and used syringes, or clearing up after floods. We do everything, in fact, to ensure the subways are as pleasant as possible for commuters and visitors.
Specialist formulations
And because every subway or underpass is different, we have developed specialist formulations and technologies to remove limescale and dirt from granite, sandstone, limestone, terrazzo and ceramics. For example, hydrochloric acid reacts with the lime in cement and terrazzo paving, leaving unacceptable deposits.We have formulated cleaning agents and developed procedures to overcome these problems.
We're contracted to visit each of the 55 subways every six weeks. In reality, it can be more frequent than that. We're often called out during the night to replace a broken paving slab before the next day's rush hour, or to repair stonework or railings damaged by road traffic accidents.
Much of what we do is messy or mundane, but we were also involved in major refurbishment at Edgware Road - a project that reaffirmed TFL's commitment (and our own) to make Central London's subways cleaner and safer places to walk.
