Our 30th Birthday Celebration

"Paul Wood and I joined forces 30 years ago with one motivation.

We, perhaps rather arrogantly, thought we could do things better. Better projects, Better engineering, Better employer.

The need to do things ‘better’ has always been a driver for me, personally. I suspect this comes from my school reports which always said ‘Gary could do better’.

But I don’t want to look back at what we have done over those 30 years. Our track record is evident to you all. Looking forward is now far more important.

As many of you will know, we announced our vision and purpose over five years ago.

We coined a simple phrase, ‘Engineering a Better Society’. We launched our ETHICS manifesto together with our coworking and collaboration community, The Building Society, at our 25th anniversary.

This, incidentally, has now been rebranded as ‘Society Building’ because the FCA (bless them!) were totally obsessed with our inability to provide mortgages. Yes! That is sadly true!

These initiatives were all aimed at bringing our industry together to challenge, share, learn and collaborate. We wanted to develop fresh ideas. We wanted to stimulate action for our industry to ‘do better’. We partnered with many of you to provide open-source tools and publications relating to carbon, the circular economy and reuse, and we have continued to push the boundaries on many of our engineering projects.

The launch of The Building Archives is our most recent initiative to facilitate the reuse and preservation of our existing buildings and built heritage.

That is why five years after our ETHICS manifesto, we are releasing ETHICS 2.0.

It moves us beyond the big questions because time is running out. It examines the action that we can take. Action that we, the built environment, could do today, should
do today, must do today.

Not waiting for a silver bullet. We don’t have the luxury of time. We need to focus on action, take accountability and use the power of our industry to shape places that truly do better.

We cannot do it alone, none of us can. But I would encourage you to ask one of our team about the boy who saves starfish. That will make sense when you hear the story!

But this evening, celebrating as we are, I want to thank all of our incredible clients and colleagues who have put their trust in us.

I would also like to thank my fellow Directors for being relentless with our vision, and I want to thank every one of our team, past and present, for the role that they have played to ensure our legacy is one where we could all look our teachers in the eye and say 'I did better'.

So thank you for being here, and thank you for being a part of our journey so far and we look forward to working with you all ‘to do better’ in the next 30 years."