A Substantial Structural Steel Package on a Landmark Redevelopment

Some jobs are gates and railings. Others hold the whole building up. This one was firmly the second kind.

We're currently supplying and installing the complete structural steel package for a major mixed-use redevelopment on Commercial Street, Newport: ground-floor retail, a coffee shop, and thirteen flats above. The main contractor is Skystone Design and Build, and it's a substantial steel package.

What the job involves

This is a heritage building being taken right back to its bones. The existing floors and roof have been stripped out, leaving the original brick shell standing behind scaffold. Our job is to thread a new steel skeleton through the middle of it, carrying the loads the old timber and masonry no longer can.

Every beam is designed, fabricated and craned into place to the millimetre. There's no room for "near enough" when a steel is picking up the floors of thirteen homes above a shopfront.

Design, supply and install

We're handling the lot: the fabrication drawings, the steel itself, and the installation on site. That end-to-end control is the point. When the same firm draws it, makes it and fits it, there's nobody to pass the blame to and nothing lost between three different companies.

On a project this size, working to a main contractor's programme, that matters even more. Skystone need the steel in, signed off and out of their way so the following trades can get moving. No delays, no excuses.

Why it went to a fabricator like us

A structural package like this needs more than a welder. It needs a firm that understands load paths, connection detail and the awkward reality of fitting new steel into a building that's a century old and no longer square.

We have made structural steel in Newport since 1919. Five generations on, that experience is exactly what a job like this calls for. The decorative ironwork and gates we are known for share the same workshop, the same hands and the same standards as the heavy structural work.

What it means for the building

Once our steel is in, the building has a complete new frame ready for the floors, walls and flats to be built around it. A tired old shell, given the bones to serve another hundred years.

It is not the kind of work the public ever sees. It ends up buried in the fabric of the building, painted over and plastered in. But it will hold up a coffee shop, a row of shops and thirteen homes, and it will be doing that long after all of us are gone. That is structural steel done properly.