Merchant Taylors’ School is a Private Boys and Girls school in Liverpool. Established in 1620, it has enormous heritage and standing in the locality.

The school boasts amazing facilities that include grand libraries and state-of-the-art sports facilities. The site combines old, opulent buildings with brand new cutting-edge design, and they are rightly proud of their school.

However, their canteen was in need of modernisation, to bring it on par with the rest of the surroundings, but also to help solve some problems.

Firstly, the canteen was purely and simply dark and uninviting.

Also, It had some bottlenecks, where the flow of schoolchildren through the space was not working efficiently.

Finally, they wanted to increase the size of the sitting area to accommodate more hungry youngsters.

You can get a feel for how the canteen use to be on these ‘before’ snaps. It was a bit dingy…

Daga Projects were involved in the work to raise the ceilings and reconfigure the space. Our challenge was to bring this job in on time, as we were working over the six-week holiday. This meant that no delays could be tolerated.

We were also mindful that, even though this was a holiday period, there were still plenty of children around, attending a variety of summer holiday clubs. This meant adhering to one of our pledges: ‘We will respect the surroundings that we are working in’. Daga Projects are meticulous about being compliant, so of course we had all of our DBS checks in place.

Having agreed timescales and budgets, we soon got to work. We removed the old ceiling and uncovered some original beams which we smoothed off to provide a modern look and feel, with more detail than previously.

It wasn’t long into the project however that we uncovered asbestos within the ceiling vault. This meant that we had to stay off site whilst it was removed. It also meant that when we returned, we had to work even harder to ensure that the project still came in on time, despite this unforeseen problem.

That’s ok though, we know that being flexible is an important consideration in our line of work.

Once this had been done, we reconfigured some of the walls to open up the space and improve the flow through the canteen. This also facilitated a self-service canteen which meant there would be more working space for the canteen staff too.

Here are some pictures of the finished space:

Daga Projects. Your results are our reputation.

We are immensely proud of how this project turned out. It really was a transformational exercise, where the change from old to new really felt like moving from night to day.

The school were over the moon with the results too. In fact, the canteen now features prominently in their school prospectus as a showcase area. It is actually helping to sell the school to prospective students and their parents.

Finally, we quickly want to give a shout-out to Fatfish design, who project managed the build and came up with the amazing design. You can find out more about them here: https://fatfishdesign.com/