June 2009
Longleat House Gets A Good Scrubbing!
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Lord Bath inspects the window cleaning in progress |
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The hot weather might be great for the lions at Longleat but the sunlight does show up the grime and dirt on the windows! Imagine the challenge to staff in Longleat House therefore when the 365 windows on the House need cleaning!
This is no job for your local window cleaner however as the House measures over 20 metres in height and has over 1966 individual panes to clean!
Longleat therefore turned to CrossCo in Weston Super Mare who specialise in buildings on the somewhat larger scale.
As Steve Blyth, Longleat House Steward explained “It is imperative that we get the windows cleaned as, with around 300,000 visitors through the House each year, they’d soon notice if the windows weren’t spotless.
“The remarkable thing about CrossCo is, that despite the height of the House, they still work from the ground. They use an extendable pole with a brush on the end which fires out jets of filtered water. No detergent is required so there are no concerns with the environmental impact
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Extendable brushes tackle the 63ft high house |
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and the windows are sparkling at the end!”
The windows on Longleat House are composed of plate glass with wooden window bars glued on top. The windows would have been leaded glass but, with the introduction of plate glass in the 19th century, the 4th Marquess decided to replace all of the windows in the House. The wooden bars were then added by the 6th Marquess to make the windows look more like windows!
Mark Griffin, Managing Director of CrossCo confirmed “We were delighted to win the contract for Longleat House in recent years. Our filtered water is ninety eight per cent pure and is ideal for historic properties of this nature. We are intending that the job will be complete within three and a half days which can’t be bad for a house of this size!”
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