This month’s construction industry gossip: The bigger picture

Bacon and eggs

With developers umming and ahhing over what schemes to press go on, I’m reminded of the advice the late Irvine Sellar would sometimes dish out to the project. He wanted to know whether someone was involved or committed. He used a metaphor involving English breakfast to get his point across. The hen, he would say, was involved but the pig was committed. A question developers might be asking themselves from now on: are they hen or pig?

Largely a corporate office like any other, decorative flourishes caught the eye – most notably, the large painting of Donald Trump hanging behind the prince’s desk

Nighthawks

Speaking of breakfast, a recent one at the Duck and Waffle in the City saw my curious hack wonder who does the restaurant cater for at 3 in the morning. The eatery at 110 Bishopsgate – older readers still know it as the Heron tower – is a 24-hour operation. Who comes in at 3 in the morning, he wondered? Well, the chap on the front desk the day he went in, suggested sometimes it was workers burning the midnight oil but mostly it’s people going to and from airports. Either they’ve come in a red eye or they’ve got an early start and fancy a quick bite. The best time to go, apparently, is about 4 in the morning. There’s no one in, apparently.

A question of sport

Our reporter travelled to Dubai recently for an upcoming series on the Middle East market. After landing in a country not primarily known for its love of journalism and freedom of expression, my hack was feeling a little uneasy when he was randomly stopped by security at the doors of the airport. Checking over the journo’s papers, the stony-faced police officer began a series of questions. What are you in the country for? Business. What do you do? [Sheepishly] Journalism…Who do you write for? Building magazine. His face showed a flash of recognition and admiration for the storied built environment trade title, before settling back into its occupational sternness. The officer resumed the questioning, as my hack got increasingly nervy. Where are you from? Macclesfield Where is it near? Manchester. Who do you support? Liverpool. Still stony-faced, the officer returned my journo’s passport and sent him off with a fist-bump and a piece of advice: “You should write about Arne Slot”.

Send in the clowns

Safely beyond the airport cops, my hack headed out to interview the top team at a big UAE developer. The conversations took place in the office of one of the firm’s senior leaders, who happens to be a middle-tier Saudi prince. While the prince himself was absent, his apparent taste in interior design gave a sense of the man’s personality. Largely a corporate office like any other, a few decorative flourishes caught the eye – most notably, the large painting of Donald Trump hanging behind the prince’s desk. In the background, Marine One sits on the White House lawn. Foreground left: The president himself, mid-flow, fielding questions. And on the right? There’s the press pack, decked out in traditional journalistic garb: stripy shirts, balloon trousers, jumbo shoes, white face paint and clown noses. This surprising work of art was met with some bemusement by the roomful of journalists, some of whom pondered if the piece had been on display at some point during Trump’s visit to the Gulf region last May. If so, he surely would have approved.

Talk of the town

The late Bob Kerslake, titan of the civil service and champion of housebuilding though he was, may not be remembered as the flashiest of public speakers – being steeped in the neutral language typical of top civil servants. Which is why it surprised my hack to watch Bob’s sister Ros leaving an audience giggling merrily with an ad-libbed speech at an Architectural Heritage Fund event in Chelsea a few weeks ago. “I’m going to keep my speech to three hours,” joked the AHF chair, before threatening to go through the organisation’s articles of association in forensic detail. “We’ve got to fill those three hours somehow… I am a lawyer after all,” she told the amused and, it must be said, mildly inebriated audience.