Those of you that have visited the underground sections of Williamson’s House on Mason Street will probably remember how awkward it was to access the subterranean chambers. For many years in order to access the Sandstone Arch, Gash and Banqueting Hall we had to descend a rather long 19ft/6m ladder down though a manhole. However, to keep ourselves and visitors safe we had been using fall arrest equipment for quite a few years now.

We have always dreamed that one day we could improve this access, well in the last year that is what we have been working on, during our Mason Street big dig. We had already done away with the need of the short ladder into the Wine Bins by uncovering the original stone staircase down from Williamson’s House into the basement. This enabled us to use a much shorter ladder from the Basement down into the deeper chambers.

Rex, one of our regular volunteers, spoke to a friend of his in a family owned steel fabrication company. Well we were absolutely delighted when JB Fabrication (Wrexham) Ltd www.jbfabrication.co.uk offered to build us the required stairs that we needed absolutely free of charge.

So Tom, Ted, John and Alisdair set to taking the necessary complicated measurements and planning, which were then sent to JB Fabrication and a few weeks later a van turned up with our staircase on board.

Last Sunday (4^th March 2018), the team worked hard in assembling the galvanised large Meccano set, into the finished new staircase.

Well our dream has finally come true, we now have safe and easy access to the Banqueting Hall. We cannot thank Andrew and Joe Broderick and their team at JB Fabrication enough for their incredibly generous donation.

Many Thanks to JB Fabrication (Wrexham) Ltd, from all the members and volunteers of FoWT.