rover49 wrote:Some of the internal walls were likely to be acting as diaphragm walls as well. If the council there is anything like North Lincs the designers had probably just been moved from street cleaning to avoid laying them off.
It was actually an interesting time to work in the building trade, there were lots of "innovations" being introduced especially in the field of quick and cheap social house building, as I've mentioned before the billions that must have been spent at that time is staggering when you look at what has happened since, unfortunately we now look back and realise that a lot of that "innovation" was money just burned or thrown down the drain or just spent for the sake of getting a task done quicker or cheaper or in mass produced style.
One that springs to mind is what we all affectionately came to know as "donkeys breakfast" partition walls - pre-manufactured panels would be brought to site in standard sizes and literally just nailed into place while the shell of the building was going up, you could divide up a ground floor into rooms in about an hour as long as all the panels went in the right place.
Inside each two inch thick pre-boarded panel were conduits for our cables, pipes for central heating were attached to the surface after installation, inside each two inch thick panel was the donkeys breakfast, basically shredded straw that was packed between the plasterboards and would, the designers promised offer high levels of insulation - very true.
Problems came when measurements were out or if conduits weren't where they should be, if you had to cut a hole anywhere in the panel then tons of shredded straw would pour out of the wall and not stop until the panel was empty and believe me, most of the panels needed cutting into at some point - by the time the sub-trades had finished most houses were knee deep in shredded pieces of straw and most of the internal walls would be empty again.
But it wasn't just the 1970s where crazy techniques had been tried out - a favourite was when rennovating hundreds of flats in areas of Newcastle that had been built at the turn of the 1900's, what looked like normal semi-detached houses would be four flats and the floor between the flats would not be a hollow cavity as you might expect but would be filled with whatever was lying around on the site, usually tons of sand to deaden the noise from upstairs, all held in place by laths and plaster - you can imagine what happens when you cut a hole in a ground floor ceiling in those sort of dwellings.
I used to love my job
