ok, should have taken pics but it was dark and dingy and here's no flash on the iphone so:

what we did was rip up ALL the floorboards that were close to where we needed to secure

we then built up pillars of bricks to go around all the pipework and electrics, but we lagged them with that pipe lagging stuff you put on water pipes first, and then wrapped a few sheets of plastic around them, before filling the gaps up with wire wool

then we put the floorboards down back were they were

then we put another set of tongue and groove boards on top of these boards

and then another lot on top of those to make the level back up to the correct height to cover all the pipes that were all over the place

the only major problem was the stop cock for the gas, which is actually at the same level as the original floor, so we left that alone for the time being

but other than that, it's actually turned out to be a good days work