This month’s construction industry gossip: Planers, trains and… E-bikes

Lime disease

I’m all for active travel, and I’ll say this: some of my best friends are cyclists. But the popularity of rental e-bikes comes with its downsides, according to one colleague after a recent encounter in the capital. Arriving just after rush hour, she was attempting to lock up her own low-tech pedal bike right by the City’s Heron Tower, only to find the pavement completely blocked with hundreds of Lime bikes. Equally non-plussed by the newly formed cycle depot were two construction workers trying to figure out how they could get on with cabling works in the street. Possibly not up there with urgent global problems that need genius solutions but could someone please work out a way to make e-bikes less of a nuisance?

Possibly not up there with urgent global problems that need genius solutions but could someone please work out a way to make e-bikes less of a nuisance? 

Putting the dud into Dudley

Meet the new lot, same as the old lot. Before he was sacked for his “everyone dies in the end” comments about the Grenfell fire, Reform UK’s housing spokesperson Simon Dudley was interviewed by one of my team at his new office in Millbank. Older readers will associate the Westminster tower as the place where New Labour ran its 1997 election campaign from. And like New Labour, Dudley’s gone too.

Done to a T&T

T&T would say they were only dealing with the facts but the firm’s recent forecast that the cost of building tall towers in London had gone up by 40% in five years prompted one firm dealing with overseas funders to wince: “Thanks a bunch, T&T.”

A league apart

For many the end of March means only one thing: end of year billing. A consultant tells my hack that two weeks before the deadline, his firm was Sheffield Wednesday. How so? He explained the business operated the billings target on a football league table system and his firm was bottom of the heap – like Sheffield Wednesday (who were relegated from the Championship in February with 13 games left to play, making it the earliest ever relegation in the history of the English Football League). How had the firm done since, then, my scribe inquired. “We were aiming for Arsenal but we got to Aston Villa.” Not bad, then, but worth pointing out that table toppers Arsenal haven’t won the Premier League yet and, theoretically at least, Aston Villa, currently fourth, still could. Top of the pile still beckons.

Whining and dining

Azzurri fans who find themselves disconsolate at their team’s failure to qualify for a third consecutive World Cup may choose to drown their sorrows at Florence’s new airport terminal designed by Rafael Viñoly Architects. The terminal – scheduled for completion in two phases (2026 and 2035 but presently on hold) features a 19-acre vineyard on its sloping roof. The vineyard will be cultivated and harvested by one of the region’s leading vintners and the wine will be crafted and aged on-site in specialised cellars below the area where the ground begins to slope up to become the terminal’s roof. It probably won’t be enough to lift Italian football out of its present doldrums but it certainly beats drinking at Wetherspoons at Gatwick.

Let the train take the strain

London’s transport system may be good, but we all know it’s not a patch on those in the north of England. South Yorkshire mayor Oliver Coppard drew attention to this famous regional imbalance at last month’s Connected Places Summit in the City of London when his counterpart in Newham, Rokhsana Fiaz, had still not arrived to a panel discussion 10 minutes after it had started. “I just want to make the point, I came from south Yorkshire and I’m here on time,” Coppard quipped, drawing titters from the room. Unfair really – when will these long-suffering Londoners get the transport investment they deserve?