A new, purpose-built visitor centre at Canterbury Cathedral is part of a £25m renovation at the UNESCO World Heritage Site and centre of the Anglican communion.
A seven-year project at the English Gothic church includes a welcome centre for visitors. It will house retail, a viewing gallery and community studio exhibition space. The specialist security systems integrator Hall & Kay Security Engineering was tasked with delivering the video part of the wider project. It was essential to avoid any project overruns in such a complex, multi-disciplinary construction. Hall & Kay recommended IDIS cameras, recorders, VMS (video management software), and peripherals.
To give high-definition coverage of the welcome centre’s entrances, retail area and exhibition spaces, Hall & Kay installed IDIS high definition DC-4223WRX infra-red dome cameras. These vandal-resistant models come with varifocal lenses, wide dynamic range (WDR) and IR LEDs for images even in variable lighting. They connect to three 16-channel DD-1216 network video recorders (NVRs) to handle recording and deliver 480 images per second live view.
The licence-free IDIS Centre VMS gives the cathedral’s constables – a uniformed police force, as seen at other major British cathedrals – visual awareness and control tools for management of footage, plus the ability to configure specific user permissions to give senior staff and system administrators access to video. The cameras and NVRs blend with the centre’s architecture without detracting from the visitor experience, while providing real-time monitoring, say the installers.
David Stokes, Divisional Director, Hall & Kay Security Engineering, says: “The system is now protecting property, enhancing safety for visitors and staff, and providing a complete record of events at one of the UK’s busiest and most important heritage sites. The IDIS end-to-end solution allowed us to present this important customer with a compelling business case, including no up-front or ongoing licensing fees, inherent failover, and extended warranties that combined to demonstrate a low total cost of ownership. Importantly, the solution is also highly flexible and scalable, thanks to long-term hardware support and forward- and backward-compatibility, which future-proofs the cathedral’s investment.”
And Jamie Barnfield, Senior Sales Director, IDIS Europe, says: “The choice of IDIS video for this most sensitive of sites is testament to the reliability, quality and cybersecurity of our Korean-made tech. This is just one of many projects we are working on with Hall & Kay in line with the IDIS philosophy of building sustainable strategic partnerships with integrators and end user customers.”
Photo by Mark Rowe; a constable closing the doors to the Cathedral Precincts, one evening at 6pm last month.
