Lecture Rooms Refurbishment at University of Leicester

Smallman & Son are right on track to complete their latest construction project at The University of Leicester in time for the return of students to campus this autumn.

Working with the Estates Department team, responsible for all the improvements made to university buildings and facilities for staff and students, these latest projects for our Smallman & Son team involve the complete refurbishment of four lecture rooms in the Bennett building and two lecture rooms in the Astley Clarke Building.

Home to the School of Economics, the Astley Clarke Building was the first new building on the original University of Leicester site after 1921, the year that students were first admitted. The Bennett Building, built later on in the 1960’s, was designed by Leslie Martin who was Chair of Architecture at Cambridge University.

The first phase for our Smallman & Son team involved stripping out all the old fittings such as seating and white boards, the floor coverings, suspended ceiling, being very mindful of any asbestos debris until all the professional asbestos removal was completed. We started with the Bennett Building lecture rooms 3 and 8 by installing new ducting, a suspended ceiling, plastering walls, decorating, putting in new floor coverings and seeing smart new fixed seating installed as planned, with work in the Astley Clarke Building following on swiftly. As we find with every fast track project, there’s always a raft of different tradesmen, all working around each other!

A fascinating fact about The Bennett Building is that it is also home to‘ Jane’, the only juvenile Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton in Europe! Some 2.3m tall at the hip and 6.4m long, the fossil was found at Hell Creek in Montana, USA, in rocks of the Cretaceous Period that are about 66 million years old.

Smallman & Son also worked with the University of Leicester recently on the refurbishment of the Security Lodge. More details are available on our clients/projects page – click here