Construction News, daily blog

Last week’s fire in a Camberwell tower block, which killed 6 people, is raising questions among inspectors about the appropriateness of the tower’s fire controls.
 
Geoff Wilkinson, of Wilkinson Construction Consultants, has blogged on the issue here, and it is well worth a read.
 
The mystery, he says, is that “each individual flat should have been constructed [...]

Amid all the things that are worrying the construction industry, the Tories’ attitude to big capital spending projects must be one thing many think they could do without.
 
So far the Tories have hinted they don’t want to commit to the BSF programmes for the time being, and there have also been worrying signs over Crossrail.
 
We’re [...]

We have just launched the Built Environment Marketing Awards in association with our sister titles such as The Architect’s Journal, H&B News and AJ Specification.
 
There are 15 categories covering all aspects of marketing and business development and the awards are open to both agencies and in-house marketing teams. The deadline for entries is not until [...]

The £11 million Wrekin ruby has been described as jinxed in a report by the Financial Times.
 
The FT visited the East Sussex home of a significant former owner, South African-born businessman, Trevor Michael Hart-Jones who said “the stone is jinxed”.
 
“It was bad luck and from the moment I bought it everything went wrong.”
 
Mr Hart-Jones, 66, [...]

Spurs are set to save £40 million on the cost of their proposed 60,000 seater stadium thanks to the falling price of steel and cement, the club’s finance director has said.
Tottenham Hotspur Football Club’s FD Matthew Collecott told Bloomberg that a planning application was due in “the next few months”.
“The stadium build cost has come down [...]

If you haven’t already, it’s worth having a look at the sustainability research CN conducted with Tarmac.
The research shows that there appears to be at least a widespread acknowledgement of the problem: 64 per cent of respondents thought the issue was a threat to their business.
But the fact that chief executives and chairman were less [...]

Energy companies are asking for £2 billion in ‘state aid’ to kickstart building work on large offshore wind farm projects.
The £3 billion London Array in the Thames Estuary and Npower’s £2.2 billion Gwint y Mor off the coast of Wales are both held off as the cost of building them has doubled in the past [...]

Work has stopped on as many as 142 skyscraper projects around the world, or 11 per cent of a total of 1,324.
The figures come from Emporis, a German company which tracks development worldwide.
“When everybody’s feeling buoyant and they all think they’re going to be billionaires overnight, that’s when these ‘biggest’ plans come about. If you get [...]

Building a new airport in the Thames estuary would cost “four or five times as much” as creating the same capacity by adding a third runway at Heathrow, according to BAA chief executive officer Colin Matthews.
 
Mr Matthews told the Movers and Shakers breakfast club for property and construction managers on Friday that the proposals backed [...]

Construction News hit the headlines at the weekend, as the BBC picked up our splash that Bechtel is set to pick up a key Crossrail contract to oversee the tunnelling work underneath London.
Two separate BBC broadcasts, Five Live Breakfast, and the BBC London television news, ran the story. It was also covered on the BBC [...]