Case Studies > The Natural History Museum
When most people think of London’s Natural History Museum, the image which first comes to mind is probably of the large dinosaur in its Central Hall, a favourite of children in particular for many generations. But one of the Museum’s greatest treasures, even for those with no interest in its world-ranking collections of natural specimens from meteorites to dinosaur skeletons, is the building itself.
If ever a London building rewarded an upwards glance and a searching out of detail, it is this one – a Victorian terracotta masterpiece full of intricate mouldings. The building’s function and German Romanesque style gave architect Alfred Waterhouse the licence he needed to adorn the building inside and out with a riot of terracotta animals and plants. Throughout the galleries, creatures extinct and living cling to the corners of walls and perch on columns, while decorated terracotta panels line the walls.
The building’s stature is recognised by a Grade 1 starred status – the highest level possible. Even the smallest work on the building has to be cleared with the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and English Heritage.
But although the Museum has to preserve collections and a building which have been world famous for generations, it has, particularly in recent years, sought to find new ways of communicating the wealth of knowledge within its collections to visitors of all ages. It is an approach which won it the 2004 Excellence in England Gold Award for Large Visitor Attraction of the Year from Enjoy England, formerly the English Tourist Board.
The Museum also remains an important research establishment and in late 2002 opened the first phase of its Darwin Centre, turning the spotlight on some of its 350 researchers and scientists and allowing them to deliver their expertise to on-site visitors and - through daily web broadcasts – the world.
Both the Museum’s ongoing research and its innovative displays depend on technology. The brief for Trescray Network Communications and the two other companies who pitched for the contract to update its networking infrastructure was to provide the technology it needed while working around in-situ staff and giving absolute assurances that one of the glories of the Victorian age would remain unblemished.
Trescray faced the pitch process with its normal engineering rather than sales-led approach, and a key member of the bid team was Fred Cooksley, the prospective site manager. “We definitely weren’t going to over-promise if I had anything to do with it,” said Cooksley. “Whatever we said we were going to do, I was going to have to deliver it.”
Behind Trescray’s pitch lay almost 30 years of experience with complex installations - including major corporate developments in London’s Canary Wharf - backed by its expertise in blown fibre. Trescray is one of only a very select number of UK companies authorised to deploy blown fibre technology, which allows special low-friction plastic tubes to be pre-installed when cabling pathways are opened up, with the option for fibres to be blown in later when the added capacity is needed.
The Natural History Museum was attracted to the technology by its ability to meet its current and future requirements for high-capacity fibre links while allowing it to address the strictures of public sector budgets by phasing its investment. “It’s a minimal cost uplift initially, but a major one if you try to carry out the install later,” said the Museum’s data network manager Chris Tyler.
The pitch process culminated in a three-way head to head, with each contendor having two hours to make its case and face a free-ranging question and answer session from the Museum’s IT team.
According to Tyler, Trescray won the contract against the competition because of the detail of the case it put forward. “I was also very impressed by the fact that they brought Fred into the meeting and introduced him to us as the guy that would be heading the on-site team. It’s very important to us to have that reassurance of continuity. The last thing we want is a smooth sales pitch followed by a series of handover meetings to people we’d never seen before.”
With the pitch won, Fred Cooksley moved on-site into a purpose-built temporary office in one of the Museum’s rear courtyards. A particularly detailed site survey began, with Cooksley working closely with Mike Burton of Radford Consultants. “Mike has worked on projects with the Museum over many years and probably knows the building better than anyone,” said Cooksley.
The surveys went on for three months before a single cable – copper or fibre – was laid, though Tyler is quick to stress that this was not due to any lack of application. “The design produced by Radford Consultants was very detailed - far more so than you would normally find. And the size of containment is a real issue; there are so many services running though the building that the challenge is to find acceptable routes through it without damaging its historic fabric. It’s definitely not an easy site to work on.”
If Trescray, to an outsider, seemed slow off the mark, it has made up for it since. So far, with the project continuing, over 90 kilometres of fibre and 280 kilometres of copper cabling have been installed, often in extremely tricky environments. In some places, the walls are so thick and hard, with pre-cast concrete and reinforcing iron, that Trescray has had to use diamond drilling techniques while ensuring that dust levels were strictly controlled.
According to Tyler, another challenge was the lack of spare space for rearranging staff, since there is negligible spare room in the building and all of the work has been carried out while over 800 staff remain in place. Virtually all of the work has also been carried out during the day to keep costs down.
“It really has been one of the most interesting aspects of the installation,” acknowledged Cooksley. “Many of our projects are either on new installs or in more modern buildings with virtually identical floors where we can temporarily move staff to. So while we have to liaise with lots of other contractors, space is not so much of an issue. But combine the Museum’s lack of spare space with its listed status and the virtual absence of night-time work and you’ve got a real puzzle on your hands.”
The Museum’s existing thin wire Ethernet network was extremely slow, but the new infrastructure installed by Trescray delivers Category 5e copper and a blown fibre tube to each of over 3,000 outlets, offering built-in future proofing. Although there is no fibre-to-the-desk initially, some key data-intensive departments are likely to make an early move to fibre connectivity.
One of the first fibre movers is likely to be the Museum’s recently opened Darwin Centre, where resident scientists bring the Museum’s research work to life. The Darwin Centre has its own studio and scientists at work are already being videoed and the results web-cast to the public on the Museum’s web site - www.nhm.ac.uk. Other staff clamouring for a move to full fibre connectivity are likely to be research staff carrying out electron microscopy and genetic sequencing.
The blown fibre pre-install at the Museum uses blue plastic outer tubes containing four smaller tubes down which up to eight separate fibres can later be blown. Between two and four of the larger tubes are fed to wall-mounted distribution stations at various points around the site. One of the most demanding installations has been in the Museum’s Earth Gallery towers where Trescray’s teams have blown fibre up to a height of over 40 metres. Some individual fibre runs are over 400 metres long.
Throughout the contract, Cooksley and his team have had to liaise with several key parties. In addition to English Heritage and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, whose primary interest was the building’s historic status, the Museum’s IT and estates departments have had to be kept fully briefed at all stages “And with Trescray effectively working between the public and our scientists, health and safety considerations have been vital,” said Tyler.
On any project of this type, health and safety is a priority, but particularly so at the Museum, as – like vast numbers of UK buildings - parts of it contain asbestos. While most types of asbestos are considered safe if monitored and dealt with properly, it is vital that strict procedures are followed. In parts of the Museum’s north-east block, existing electrical and network cabling ran through heating ducts lined with asbestos-backed material.
Working closely with the Museum’s specialist asbestos contractor, Trescray’s design team found a way of upgrading the cabling while ensuring that no asbestos was disturbed. But before the real work began a test install was carried out and the air monitored to ensure that the practice was safe.
With the go-ahead given, Trescray’s technicians then disconnected the old electrical and networking cable so that it could be left in place and then ran new services through a brand new ducting system fastened on top.
Trescray faced particular challenges with the Palaeontology Building, a 1970’s addition to the Museum which was undergoing a major refit. The existing thin Ethernet cable was about 15 years old and was to be torn out of all seven floors. And although 13 weeks per floor had been scheduled for the complete refit, Cooksley’s teams only had a two-week window within this to complete each floor’s cabling. Trescray blew around 30,000 metres of fibre into Palaeontology alone, with individual fibre runs of up to 440 metres.
According to Tyler, a major challenge of the project has been its sheer length. “With such a long project, it’s absolutely vital that continuity of staffing is backed by good communication between all of the parties involved, internal and external. Fred Cooksley has been invaluable in holding it all together and I’ve been very impressed by the standard of the work Trescray has carried out.”