February 1st, 2018
Specialist Street Cleaning Equipment Tackles Chewing Gum Blight
Go-Gum Group Street Cleaning Equipment Operating in the City of London
The City of London is home to many historic buildings and landmarks, all connected by equally historic highways and byways, including Catherine Wheel Alley, Bow Lane and the ancient Watling Street. The latter was used by the Britons for centuries and survives to this day after the Romans paved much of the 276 mile road beginning in AD43.
As custodians and administrators to these historic routes, The City of London authority contracted Surface Solve Ltd, the specialist street cleaning division of the Go-Gum Group, to undertake an extensive programme of chewing gum removal and street cleaning on these famous routes. Using our fleet of specialist, environmentally safe street cleaning equipment, our dedicated street scene team rid the pavements of the discarded chewing gum and deep clean the surfaces without the use of harsh chemicals or damaging abrasives.
The Surface Solve Street Cleaning Team worked both weekends and nights in order to comply with the council noise regulations and to avoid disruption to local businesses and residents. The chewing gum removal and street cleaning operations were completed within a four week period, well within the timeframe agreed with The City of London’s Street Environment Management. Our street cleaning team used three Go-Gum Lanceman DiBO Chewing Gum Removal Machines simultaneously, operated by three, highly skilled Surface Solve operatives. High temperature, low pressure cleaning, utilising both hand-lance and rotary cleaning attachments were employed, firstly to spot treat the discarded Chewing Gum mess, before the rotary unit cleaned the underlying pavement substrate and surrounding area.
In total, during the four week period of cleaning operations, nearly 4,000m2 of paving was deep cleaned with all discarded chewing gum removed. The Surface Solve team undertook street cleaning operations and chewing gum removal at the following ancient and historic locations:
- Bow Lane including Groveland Court and Well Court
- Devonshire Row including Cavendish Court
- Ludgate Square
- Queen Street junction with Cloak Lane
- Rose Alley and Catherine Wheel Alley
- St. Michael’s Alley
- Watling Street
Go-Gum Group’s Managing Director, Rob Dixon commented: “It was great to work with The City of London authority again and it was great to be working on some of the most historic routes through the city area. We were able to rid these important and ancient roads, alleys and pedestrian byways of blackened Chewing Gum blight before rejuvenating the whole area by deep cleaning the pavements and streets using our environmentally safe, street cleaning equipment.”
Upon completion of the project, Nigel Francis, Street Environment Officer for The City of London said: “All of the sites were professionally deep cleaned to a very high standard. A number of the jobs were carried out in noise sensitive, residential areas but due to their professionalism and excellent customer services, the Go-Gum crew were able to complete all of the tasks without receiving a single complaint. In fact, all we received was positive feedback from all of the businesses located in the areas that were recently deep cleaned.”
“Without a doubt, The Go-Gum Group are a very professional company and the City of London will not have any hesitation in employing their services again in the future.”
Specialist Street Cleaning Equipment in Action
