A good Derry rumour!

Wednesday, April 22nd 2009 is a day that will stick in my mind. Tom Hesketh, Director of RTU travelled from Belfast for an IIP Conference we were hosting here in the school. As he got near Creggan he stopped to enquire from a local gentleman where exactly the school was located. The man confidently replied “St Mary’s have moved to a brand new school at Northland Road. They were up at Fanad Drive for years but they moved out a while ago“.  So poor Tom rang his Belfast office to double check that we had not moved to Northland Road and forgot to tell him. I think it is another great Derry rumour.

I do understand why the gentleman thought we had moved. The site meeting at Northland Road on Holy Thursday was amazing. The school is really shaping up very fast. When we climbed the ladder we  could  see the corridor going in both directions. When John Donnelly arrived on the ground floor I felt I was welcoming him to the St Mary’s as our first guest ever. John O’ Flaherty was able to identify each area from memory and I actually stood in a Language classroom! It was very exciting to see the plans coming to life so quickly.  The resource areas and and the recording area are also shaping up well.  I was pleasantly surprised to see how near the Nortland Road the Technology block will be. My dodgy spatial awareness had located that much further back on the site.

A lot of things bewilder me about the building process but mostly I say nothing in case I sound daft. For example, it seems odd to me that they are doing so much work to the roof when the walls are not built! I always thought you started from the ground and worked up but I am seeing something different. Needless to say I did not ask about this at the site meeting.

The Building Handbook is very, very annoying. At the last site meeting there was a wonderful ‘underground/subfloor’ space at the front of the building that would have been superb for storage. When we returned the entire area had been filled in to be ‘hanbook compliant’. The waste was not that noticable to me when I was looking at the plans but it was very obvious on site. What a loss! What a shame! What good use the school could have made of that space. Somebody in the Department of Education needs to say that decisions should in the first instance be sensible and we should not be doing silly and costly things just to be ‘ compliant’.

Apart from that it is great to see the progress being made. There are no delays and work is on schedule so well done to all the workers!

The only other thing of note arising from the meeting was the great lack of progress re.the erection of a sign on the site. It now seems that the planning application has gone to water service ( I am puzzled) and road service ( I understand this) for comment and it will be 30th April before we have a response. By my calculation that is 43 working days (excluding St Patrick’s Day, Good Friday and Easter Monday) to get a response for a temporary sign.  Need I say more?

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 9:30 am and is filed under New Build. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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