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STRESS has provided specialist services to the insurance industry through major loss adjusters and for most of the main insurers for more than 30 years. We have a wealth of experience dealing with regular, and sometimes challenging, subsidence and listed building claims. We pride ourselves in providing innovative solutions to difficult and unusual projects.
Historic buildings and structures are susceptible to climatic changes or accidental damage. We provide insurers with help, guidance and solutions for listed building claims.
Our team includes chartered geotechnical and structural engineers, highly experienced surveyors and a heritage qualified conservation manager. We deliver the best professional assistance to our insurance clients.
Finding the appropriate remedial foundation improvement to support an existing structure which has suffered subsidence is an art as well as a science. There is a balance between no intervention and wasted effect, and the skill is to carry out as little remedial work as possible whilst also solving the problem, for the long term.
STRESS’ qualified engineers have decades of experience help clients save money and disruption. As a long-time member of the association of underpinning contractors all underpinning schemes come with an ASUC insurance backed guarantee.
When ground conditions permit, the technique of permeation engineering can save considerable costs and disruption so helping to satisfy both insurer and claimant. STRESS uses the well tried and tested patented ReFORCE system to underpin buildings and structures. Our geotechnical engineers design appropriate solutions and our trained technicians install the piling works to specification. The technique has proven very effective in economically and swiftly capping solution features.
‘The art of structural repair’. The most important thing is to design an appropriate and sympathetic remedial solution to suit the problem, the age and type of structure. STRESS has in excess of 30 years specifying and installing remedial structural schemes to all types of edifices from dwellings to bridges, listed buildings and monuments to commercial structures. As one of Helifix’s oldest and largest approved installers we can design and install complex masonry reinforcing solutions. All approved structural repairs schemes come with an ASUC insurance backed guarantee.
Repairing heritage structures requires a different level of consideration and our in-house conservation department with their qualified staff of managers, engineers and trained craft persons ensure that our insurance clients are helped through the obstacle course of listed building consent for remedial works. We produce relevant Design & Access Statements and engage directly with Local Authority and English Heritage officers to ensure that any required works are carried out to and meet specification. Our highly experienced heritage crafts-people repair masonry, live renders pointing, timber work through to ancient skills such as wattle and daub.
Producing elegant, relevant, practical and cost-effective solutions, particularly for complex problems which require specialist techniques often falls outside conventional approaches. STRESS’S engineers, surveyors and technical teams can assist and design unusual and often innovative methods of repair and strengthening.
Temporary and emergency building support can be designed and installed by our experienced team to safeguard structures in danger of partial collapse. Examples include vehicle impacts, structural and foundation failure or fire and flood.
1930s culvert, demolition and rebuild
My 1930s culvert, originally designed to take hay carts and threshing machines across a deep drainage ditch to former Glebe land, couldn’t withstand the power of the flood water resulting from Storm Babet in October 2023. Demolition and rebuild were the only options. It took a year and a half to find a company both willing and technically suitable for the job as the logistics were extremely challenging, and by June 2025 I had begun to despair.
Enter STRESS; introduced to me by the structural engineers Gately Smithers Purslow, and ‘Just Like That’ the stress was gone. Work began in July 2025 and within a month was completed. A process I had dreaded because of the intrusion into my property as access to the site was so difficult, became the highpoint of my summer.
As a landscaper I was fascinated by the process and felt involved as I was regularly updated with what was happening next, and my concerns and opinions were respected and my property treated with utmost consideration. The visual loss of the old culvert along with its history is sad, but instead I have something fit for the 21C and all the challenges it appears to be bringing, and a major component of the flood defences for the Community.
Private client.