The Farnham Herald has been given a glimpse of the restoration work at Willmer House (the Museum of Farnham). The facade of the Georgian gem is one of the rarest and best of its kind in the UK, with project bosses calling the scheme a 'once in a lifetime' job.
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00:00Dean is over there, hiding. Dean is the other brick inspector.
00:14And Bydos is helping us today with some carpentry. We're just doing some temporary
00:23support structure for the roof structure. When Emma first looked at this building in 2015,
00:30she did her survey and then I did mine about two years ago and Emma felt at that time that
00:37the parapet wall did not look original because the bricks were different to the main walls and
00:41just the whole thing just didn't look right. And that hunch was confirmed when we took it down
00:47because what we found was this is the backing brickwork and what they've done they hacked
00:54away the wall and then just built a skin of brickwork in front of it. And all of these
00:59dobs of mortar are cement. There was a painstaking testing. We brought the guy down didn't you?
01:07Yeah. Yeah so they do a lot of testing and get the colour consistent. It's actually a high quality
01:13building built with local materials so these bricks would have been probably made in this area
01:19probably by bricklayers working who grew up around here.