2017: Year in Review
As we are now well into 2018, I thought I would take a brief look back at the past year before sharing a few plans for 2018. Having spent a number of years in Surbiton, Spring 2017 saw the closure of our Surbiton office as it no longer met our business needs. Some aspects of our business are now managed from our office in Exeter, whilst Addlestone provides us with another working space in anticipation of our re-establishing a permanent presence in central London. More on that shortly.
Over the course of the last 12 months, we have continued to help bring a number of brownfield sites back into life, assessing and demonstrating development potential on a number of closed landfills and seeing these through to construction. We also maintain a strong presence in central London by assisting on several large mixed use schemes, looking at temporary and permanent works for deep basements, deep foundations and bringing former industrial sites back into use through detailed risk assessment and remedial design.
GB Card & Partners (GBCP) presented the South West Contaminated Land Forum in Exeter on our landfill engineering expertise and the GBCP ‘Landfill Development Index’ (LDI) . A number of our clients have benefited from our expertise on soil gas assessments and remedial designs, particularly those with more problematic sites. Our support of CIRIA in their research programmes helps us keep up to date with industry best practice. We also have close links with a number of universities and professional bodies, including the Institution of Civil Engineers, and have recently contributed to studies and discussions on skill shortages/industry requirements with the ICE and through representation on an Industrial Advisory Group.
In the summer, Project Wareham was recognised by the Institution of Civil Engineers and we attended the Awards dinner with colleagues from Swanage Railway to accept the award for Winner of the Under £1m project category. Our work with Swanage Railway continues as they develop their infrastructure further.
Throughout 2017, GBCP has demonstrated commitment to continuing professional development with staff being accepted on two well-established professional registers; one on the Qualified Person register for CL:AIRE Definition of Waste: Code of Practice (DoW:CoP) and another achieving ‘UK Registered Ground Engineering Specialist’ status. Joining these registers demonstrates experience in the fields of land contamination and ground engineering, adding to the established experience of our Senior Team Members. Involvement of our competent and qualified ground engineering professionals at an early stage and throughout construction has helped to reduce ground risk and develop successful projects with our clients.
Our South West team also set themselves an informal target of commuting a minimum of 10,000 miles to work over the year. This was successfully achieved in December, with over 5000 miles being clocked up by just one cyclist! This year’s challenge will be somewhat bigger I’m sure.
As we now move into 2018, we are mindful of the need to keep looking forward. In this regard, we are committed to re-establishing a permanent office in central London and, having taken some time to consider this move, we will soon be opening the doors to new office space. In addition, we will be appointing a number of new positions this year to manage current workload and help the company grow. As we look into 2018, there are many uncertainties, but we also see many opportunities, and it is these opportunities that drive us forward. I will be chairing Ground Gas 2018 in London in March and I hope to see many of you there. As a company, we continue to offer our support to a number of local, national and international initiatives. This year, we are taking particular interest in the UN Sustainable Development Goals as well as supporting local cycling interests. And yes, Swanage Railway will feature in our support again this year.
So much to look forward to and many clients to catch up with, but do drop us a line or call in to see us. And if you don’t receive our newsletter, sign up via the website.