06 The yard at 336 Albert Royds Street
Everything on a job is loaded out of one yard in Rochdale, and the reason the programme behaves is that the yard, not the site, is where the week is decided.
A commercial unit has nowhere to put anything. There is no compound, no spare bay, no corner you can leave a bundle of track in. So material arrives on the shift it is needed for, in the quantity that shift needs, and goes straight behind the screen line. What does not fit that rule stays here until it does.
06.1 What the yard holds
The yard is a working store rather than a depot. What is kept here is the protection and small plant that every occupied-premises job needs on the first morning, so a start is never waiting on a hire desk:
- Screen track, zip-door kits, sheeting and tape, plus the stud and sheet material for a solid hoarding.
- Negative pressure units, extraction vacuums and the hoses and filters for them.
- Transformers, leads, task lighting and temporary lighting for a work zone with the ceiling out.
- Floor protection, shopfront protection, corner guards and matting for the route in.
- Adjustable props and spreaders, with the sizes a drawing calls for brought in against the drawing.
- Signage: route diversion, fire route, screen-line notices and the site notice board itself.
Scaffold, excavators, pumps and anything a temporary works design specifies are hired in for the stage and go back when the stage ends, with the handover sheets filed on site. Skips are ordered against the dates on the programme and go with a licensed carrier, and the transfer notes come back to the yard.
06.2 The trades on the books
The site team is engaged directly by NORTHSIDE SOLUTIONS LTD: groundworker, bricklayer, joiner, dry liner, electrician, plumber, plasterer and labourer, with one site agent running the job. They are the same faces from the strip-out to the handback walk.
Specialist work that needs a licence or a certificate of its own — a fire alarm connection, a sprinkler alteration, a gas connection, asbestos removal where a survey finds it — is placed with a firm that holds that licence, and we say so on the programme rather than blurring it. That is the only place a second firm appears on one of our jobs, and when it does it is named.
On an occupied job the person who has to stop a cut because a customer walked round a screen is a trade, not a manager. Directly engaged trades take that decision as part of the job. A chain of subcontractors takes it as somebody else’s loss of an hour, and that is where occupied-premises work goes wrong.
06.3 Loading out for the week
The week is picked and loaded here before it starts. The site agent takes the shift list off the programme, lists what each shift needs, and the van is loaded in reverse order so the first thing needed is the last thing in. Material for a shift that has slipped is left on the rack rather than sent and stacked in a trading unit.
Deliveries that cannot come through the yard — plasterboard, steel, long lengths — are booked direct to site inside the window the premises has given, and somebody from the team is there to take them. A wagon turning up at a shop with no one to meet it is a blocked service yard and an unhappy neighbour, and it is always avoidable.
06.4 Why the team stays one team
We take one commercial job at a time and finish it before the next one starts. It is a deliberate limit, not a stage we are growing out of. A single team split across two occupied premises is a team that is late on both, because out-of-hours shifts cannot be moved around — they are fixed to somebody’s closing time.
It also means the enquiry answered from this yard is answered by somebody who will be on your site. If the dates on the programme do not work for the hours your premises can give up, you are told at enquiry stage rather than at week four.
06.5 Where the van goes from here
The yard sits on Albert Royds Street, east of Rochdale town centre, which puts the team on the M62 corridor and inside Greater Manchester for a working day with an out-of-hours shift at either end of it. Work is taken across Rochdale, Heywood, Middleton, Oldham, Bury, Bolton and into Manchester, and towards Todmorden and the Calder valley where a job suits the team.
Site visits are made outside your trading hours where that is easier for you — the survey visit usually is, because an empty unit measures faster and the ceiling void can be opened without an audience. Ask for a visit, or send the dust and noise measures you need, at site@northsidesolutions.work; what is useful in a first message is set out at the foot of the opening page.