in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire and are close to all major routes including the A1. Please see our Contact Us page for directions and full address. Visits to our showroom & warehouse are also welcomed and our staff are always at hand to help you find what you're looking for.You do not have the Flash or Quicktime plugin and your browser does not support HTML5 video. Office chair buying guide We offer a wide range of home office chairs, from simple stools for web surfing, to complex ergonomic seats for long hours at your desk. With so much choice, our guide makes buying the perfect chair easy – all you have to do is assess your needs and working style. Watch the video above for more information on chair ergonomics. If you're considering installing a proper home office, we offer a fitted office service in our shops - find out more. Ergonomics is the application of scientific information to the design of objects, systems and environment, making them more efficient and comfortable to use.
Ergonomically correct and comfortable seating should provide stable body support in a varietyof postures. In addition, the design of the workplace and furniture should encourage a certain amount of movement and changing of posture. The main requirements for good seating are that: circulation in the thighs is not restricted, the posture requires little muscular effort to maintain, the loading (stress) on the spine is minimised and maintains the natural S-shape of the spine without the need for muscular tension. A good work chair should be: fit for the intended purpose, enabling you to move freely and carry out tasks comfortably and efficiently able to accommodate everyone who intends to use it, regardless of size or shape supportive of your body in a number of comfortable postures suited to your workstation, especially the height of the table or desk and the layout of the equipment on it. How long will you be using the chair for? occasionally - less than 2 hours a day
working part-time between 2 to 4 hours a day more than 4 hours a day - more or less full time The longer you’re using the chair, the more adjustable features you’ll need. All the adjustments should be within easy reach and you should be able to operate them, while seated, with minimal effort. Lumbar support is essential if you’re going to use the chair for long periods Will anyone else be using your chair? If s/he is quite different to you in height, weight and build, then you’ll need a chair which easily adjusts for each of you, and has height-adjustable lumbar support. This is the most important feature. Your feet should rest flat on the floor without compressing the back of your thighs, otherwise you’ll restrict blood supply to your lower legs and feet – resulting in tired and possibly numb legs. When you’re working at a table which can’t be adjusted in height, adjust your chair according to the height of your table, lowering the chair until your elbows are just above the table top.
If your feet still don’t rest flat on the floor, get a footrest. If the seat depth isn’t adjustable, it should at least allow you to sit right at the back of the chair without pressing the backs of your knees. You need to sit right at the back of the chair to use the backrest correctly and support your lumbar. It’s essential that the chair has a backrest with an appropriate size and shape, to support the lower and middle back properly without restricting arm or shoulder movements. The backrest should help you to maintain the natural S-shape of your spine when you’re sitting. Tilting the backrest allows you to adopt different postures, e.g. upright, or semi-reclined. When you sit on a work chair, the angle between your thighs and back should be around 95 to 105 degrees so that your abdomen and chest are open and not compressed. Opening up more of the angle between your body and thighs lets you breathe better, sending more oxygen to your muscles. The human body isn’t designed for static postures, especially sitting.
The longer you work, the more important the chair movement becomes, such as the ability to recline. It’s better to make small movements in the chair rather than continually fidgeting. Such chair movements depend on your weight, so office chairs should ideally have auto weight adjustment. If not, you should be able to adjust the tension of the backrest, so that you’re in total balance whether you’re upright or leaning back, and able to maintain good posture without having to exert excessive force. If you’re going to spend some time in the chair, you need to support the weight of your arms. Fixed height armrests are fine for occasional use, but for extended use, they should adjust, at least in height. Height adjustable arms can be lowered to go neatly under the desk when the chair’s not in use. The best ergonomic chairs will allow you to change the width between armrests to suit your body width, so that they are close to you where you need them. If the armrests prevent you getting close to the table or desk, you’ll end up sitting at the front edge of seat and not be able to use the backrest correctly, losing lumbar support.
This is also a very important feature. When you’re working, you may need to reach other parts of the table or desk. If the chair doesn’t swivel, you may have to frequently twist your back to reach – not good for your back. The seat, armrest and backrest should be padded firmly enough to support you, but should feel soft enough for you not to feel pressure points, or the hardness of the chair frame, on the base of the two prongs of your pelvis. The chair covers should be permeable so that the seat can breathe and minimise the build up of heat on the seat. Remember: even on an ergonomically correct chair, don’t sit for a long time without a break! Get up and do other things, such as a few simple stretching exercises. Short but frequent breaks are much better for you (both physically and mentally) than one long break after a very long time. The Regius Chair of Engineering is a royal professorship in engineering, established since 1868 in the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
The Chair is attached to the university's College of Science & Engineering, based in the King's Buildings in Edinburgh. Appointment to the Regius Chair is by Royal Warrant from the British monarch, on the recommendation of Scotland's First Minister. Regius professorships are a unique feature of academia in the British Isles. The first Regius professorship was in the field of medicine, and founded by the Scottish King James IV at Aberdeen University in 1497. Regius Chairs have since been instituted in a variety of academic disciplines in various universities. Each was established by a British monarch, and — except in Ireland — the current monarch still officially appoints the professor (following proper advertisement and interview, through the offices of the university and the national government). This royal imprimatur, and the relative rarity of these professorships, means a Regius Chair is prestigious and highly sought-after. Regius Professors are traditionally addressed as 'Regius' and not 'Professor'.
George Wilson was appointed to a new Regius Chair of Technology in the University of Edinburgh in 1855. His interest in acquiring artefacts and relics of the industrial revolution led to his simultaneous appointment as the first Director of the Industrial Museum of Scotland (now part of the National Museum of Scotland). While this Chair of Technology was abolished on Wilson's death in 1859, the growing importance of engineering studies at Edinburgh University was recognised by the founding of the Regius Chair of Engineering by Queen Victoria in 1868 within the university's Faculty of Arts. The new Chair was endowed by Sir David Baxter, of Dundee, and supplemented by annual funds from the UK parliament. Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin was appointed from the Chair of Engineering at University College, London, to be its first incumbent. Fleeming (pronounced as "Fleming", so we are informed by his one-time student Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote an affectionate memoir of him) Jenkin brought to the Regius Chair a notable combination of scientific knowledge, practical experience and business acumen.
His reputation rested principally on his work on long-distance undersea telegraphy, and as a member of the committee which drew up the proposals for methods of electrical measurement, subsequently ratified as international electrical standards. In 1885 George Armstrong, a specialist in railway engineering, became the second Regius Professor, following his move from Yorkshire.[1] Under his supervision, the Fulton Engineering Laboratory was established in 1889, "to provide systematic instruction on experimental methods ... and to familiarise students with the strength and other physical properties of the chief materials used by engineers." Following Armstrong's death in 1900, Thomas Hudson Beare was appointed as the third Regius Professor of Engineering.[1] He oversaw the Engineering Department grow from a handful of students in the basement of the university's Old College to more than a hundred occupying what the Edinburgh University Journal called "one of the best planned and equipped engineering schools in the Empire".
These were the new engineering facilities at the university's King's Buildings, which had been opened in 1935. In 1946 Ronald Arnold, a Glasgow-born specialist in structural analysis and gyrodynamics, was appointed from Swansea University as the fourth Regius Professor of Engineering. Arnold pioneered in 1960 the division of the unitary department of engineering into separate departments of civil, mechanical and electrical engineering. Following the untimely death of Arnold in 1963, Leslie Jaeger was appointed fifth Regius Professor, from Magdalene College, Cambridge. Jaeger’s appointment was brief, leaving after only four years to take up the Chair of Civil Engineering and Applied Mechanics at McGill University (coincidentally, the Chair that a previous Regius Professor, George Armstrong, had held much earlier). James King, former Chief Scientist in the Naval Construction Research Establishment at Rosyth, became the sixth Regius Professor in 1968, and on his retirement in 1983 the seventh holder of the Chair was Joseph McGeough, who was appointed from the University of Aberdeen to expand the Edinburgh research activities in electro-chemical machining.
Following McGeough's retiral in 2005, the university appointed, in 2007, Peter Grant as the eighth Regius Professor of Engineering, from within the enlarged 26-strong body of professors in the newly merged School of Engineering. Grant had previously led the signal processing research at Edinburgh, with achievements in the design of adaptive filters and mobile communication receivers. He was President of EURASIP, the European Association for Signal Processing from 2000–02 and recipient of the 2004 IEE Faraday medal. In 2008 he was awarded an OBE. In 2013 Jason Reese was appointed the ninth Regius Professor of Engineering. With a background in physics and applied mathematics, his research focuses on multiscale flow systems in which the molecular nature of the fluid determines the overall fluid dynamics. For example, micro and nano flows. A former Philip Leverhulme Prize for Engineering (Leverhulme Trust) winner, Bruce-Preller Prize Lecturer (Royal Society of Edinburgh) and MacRobert Award (Royal Academy of Engineering) finalist, he had previously been Weir Professor of Thermodynamics and Fluid Mechanics, and Head of the Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Department, at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.