October 6th, 2025

£26 million Castlegate Regeneration Scheme Deep Cleaned with Graffiti Removed

Castlegate Wall Sheffield Receives Deep Clean and Graffiti Removal

At the point where the River Don and the River Sheaf meet in the City of Sheffield, is the historic area known as Castlegate. The river runs alongside a pleasant, modernised riverside walk, which is in turn flanked on the opposite side by a two storey concrete retaining wall. With the Castlegate area undergoing a £26 million regeneration, the ageing concrete wall had become vandalised and blighted with graffiti. Thanks to Go-Gum and its subsidiary company Surface Solve Ltd, it’s now clean and free from graffiti.

With funding from the national Government’s ‘Levelling Up Fund’, Sheffield City Council aims to re-establish Castlegate as a thriving part of the city centre. As part of the scheme, the city council has been working with Amey PLC, who turned to The Go-Gum Group for our help and expertise in safe, effective and environmentally friendly deep clean and graffiti removal.

Following an initial site survey, it was assessed that hot water and high pressure would be required to remove any general detritus and loose shards of textured concrete render, on the face of the two storey retaining wall. Happily, the proven, versatile Go-Gum Lanceman DiBO street cleaning machine was perfectly suited to this initial task, and made light work of phase one of the cleaning process.

The Go-Gum Group’s street scene subsidiary, Surface Solve Ltd, despatched a team of two operatives and one DiBO machine. For both phases, one operator undertook the cleaning and graffiti removal, using the DiBO, whilst the second operated the MEWP (Mobile Elevating Work Platform).

Phase two of the cleaning process, involved pre-treating the graffiti with an eco-friendly graffiti remover, before using high temperature, low pressure water to clean off the graffiti scrawl, safely and effectively. The same safe working practices used in phase one, were adopted during this final phase, with one operative removing the graffiti and the other operating the MEWP.

Commenting on the deep clean and graffiti removal works, Rob Dixon, Managing Director of the Go-Gum Group said: “All deep cleaning and graffiti removal works were completed within the three days allocated to this project. The nature of the concrete render at Castlegate made us tweak our process slightly but the result was the same – all the offensive graffiti was removed safely, on-time and with minimal disruption to the people of Sheffield.”