Overview

Hampton Court Castle is a castellated country house in Herefordshire. In the summer months, the gardens and castle are open to the public, and the castle also hosts celebrations, corporate events and weddings throughout the year.

What was the requirement?

The Castle required a new network installing to allow broadband access across the castle and its grounds. This was needed to provide broadband access to both staff and visitors when they were within the grounds.

They also required a new IP CCTV system to allow the owners to monitor visitor numbers and inform where they would redesign and refurbish elements of the Castle.

Considerations

The Castle is a grade listed building which meant that cabling routes had to be designed to reduce the impact on the building and be hidden from view where possible. The routes were difficult to access because the Castle was built at a time where our equipment was not used (or invented!). We encountered walls that were significantly thicker and more fragile than modern buildings which needed to be drilled for cable routes. Due to the grade listing, visible equipment could not impact the aesthetic. The main gates also required a CCTV camera, but they were a significant distance from the control room.

Solutions

We purchased specialist equipment to enable us to drill through walls without impacting the structure of the building. We designed and implemented cabling routes that ensured that there was minimal impact to the building and that most installation equipment was not visible upon completion of the job. These routes required us to enter towers and locations within the Castle that were not easily accessible and included lifting floors and cabling through the basement. We manually altered the aesthetic of cameras and other equipment to ensure that it blended in with the colour of whatever material it was attached to. This included various tones of stone and woodwork. We employed a specialist to dig the trench from the Castle to the gates to allow us to lay fibre optic cable for the CCTV. The specialist was required because the route had to go under the Castle into the basement using specific machinery.

Results

Hampton Court Castle now has a state-of-the-art IP CCTV system in place which allows them to monitor guest activity and visitor numbers, as well as monitor vehicle activity around site.

The site wide Cat6 and fibre optic network allows staff to work across multiple premises on same network across site and provides site wide Wi-Fi to allow seamless roaming around the entire site. We also installed the network to allow for separate visitor and staff Wi-Fi access.

Network Data Services also connected fibre directly to the premises for increased broadband speeds across the whole site.