13 June 2025 | Castle & Pryor Ltd

Track Sawing and Diamond Drilling Enable Safe Mural Removal

In preparation for the demolition of Farnborough Leisure Centre in 2022, a freeze of 16 murals needed to be removed in order to preserve them for the future.

Looking back to January 2022

The plan was to re-house the 16 murals in the civic quarter development or somewhere else in Farnborough following the demolition.

The murals

The Leisure Centre was constructed in the 1970s and the murals added afterwards. The 16 intricate mosaic murals originally designed by children depict progress, people and places of local interest. The scenes include:

King Alfred & Saxon Times

Early Agriculture

Ferneberga (Farnborough) in the Domesday Book

The potteries & olde farm

Farnborough Place

A Hunting Lodge in Restoration Days

Prize fighting by the river Blackwater

Red Rover in Southampton Coach

Building of the canal & railway

The growth of the army

Samuel Cody and the ‘balloon school’

St Michael’s Abbey and the Empress Eugenie

The Aldershot Tattoo

Town center & the clock house

The RAE & the airshow

Town twinning and Europe

Originally the town thought that it would be too expensive to preserve the murals, but Castle & Pryor were able to remove them for a competitive price.

How did we do it?

We started the removal of the Mosaic Murals by diamond stitch drilling the rectangular corners, this is a technique where holes are linked together forming a slot; machinery utilised for this part of the task was the Husqvarna Diamond Drilling Rig. The holes formed prevented any overcutting of the corners during the track sawing phase as the saw blade had the potential to over cut the corner’s cause damage to the adjoining structure. Two holes lifting holes were also necessary to ease removal of the Murals so that lifting straps could be inserted appropriately to aid the lifting of the Murals once they had been isolated.

Track Sawing

We then formed cuts around the perimeter of the murals the full depth of the wall with our Tyrolit track mounted saw.

Finally, safely strapped up, the mosaics were carefully lifted from their position by the client using a excavator.

The murals were then sent into storage, waiting for a new home once the plans for Farnborough Civic Quarter were completed.

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