Thursday, 08 December 2011 00:00
Property Development Pipeline 2012
Stride Treglown are active in all construction sectors and there are some, like retail and commercial offices that are very quiet and likely to remain so. So what’s going to keep our 240 employees busy for 2012?
Firstly, food retail is far from dead and we do all the feasibilities for Sainsbury’s in the South West and Wales which will keep us pretty hectic. Sainsbury’s want new stores, extensions, convenience stores and mixed use developments so there will be activity all over the region.
We have delivered something like 20,000 student bedroom units over the past 10 years and the sector is still very active, with firm proposals in Bath, Southampton, Exeter and Bristol to name a few.
Whilst on students, we are ‘on the books’ of about 30 different universities in the UK and abroad and although there is all sorts of turmoil, universities are run by very bright people, who can weave and dive through the politics of funding and still come up with viable schemes that get built. We are working at Bath, UWE, Tremough, Bournemouth, Swansea, Reading, Chichester and others and have just finished the National Composite Centre (NCC) for Bristol University. The NCC should be the first of a number of science park buildings in north east Bristol, put together by the three ‘Bristol’ universities of Bath, Bristol and UWE who, together are a real generating force for new ideas, businesses and creativity in the region.
Although the coalition have scrapped ‘Building Schools for the Future’ they are still committed to supporting education and we are busy, working with contractors, to come up with well designed and interesting school buildings that meet the budget criteria set by Michael Gove. We have an academy in Taunton and numerous primary schools on the drawing boards (or in the computers) that will be on site next year.
Speaking of computers, the official government advisor for Construction, Paul Morrell, has said that all government projects will be built using BIM within 5 years. We’ve been using BIM,(or Building Information Modelling) for the last 10 years and all our staff are pretty well up to speed with it. The problem is that most of the rest of the industry hardly knows what BIM is, so I suspect 5 years may be a little optimistic, but our lead in the field is generating a lot of interest.
Residential work has been busy for a few years now, there is still a housing shortage and the housing developers that haven’t gone bust are now quietly back at work building well designed and carefully considered schemes that sell. We are busy in Portishead, Exeter, Taunton, Gloucester, Bath, and Truro.
For some reason there is also a shortage of hotel rooms and we have a number of hotel schemes from, ‘Snoozebox’ who will make up a temporary 4 star hotel in a weekend and take it down a week later, to a 5 star development in Dorchester which should be on site on 2012.
Even the public sector still has construction that needs doing. MOD still have the biggest estate in the country and they still need to move people around and rationalise bits of it. We are also working on new council offices in Southampton, the fourth such scheme, having recently completed South Gloucestershire and being on site at Torbay and Trowbridge. If the local authority can demonstrate that spending money will save money through more efficient building and rationalisation they do get backing from central government and I think that is one of the most important messages for 2012.
Even in the worst recession we will probably see in our lifetimes, there is always scope for looking at what you’ve got, looking at what it costs to run, and seeing if you can’t make things better through good, sustainable and rational design.
Armed with that there is still a lot to do.
Bob Whittington, Chairman, Stride Treglown Ltd.
- Happy New Year from all at Stride Treglown
- Bob Whittington, Chairman: Property Development Pipeline 2012
- Property Development Pipeline 2012