A Trip Down Memory Lane

HBPW Managing Partner, Paul Withers, did a double take when he travelled to Warwickshire to check out a new project.

Buckingham Group were tendering to build a new cable stayed bridge over the A45 at Whitley and had asked Paul to provide engineering drawings as part of their bid.

“I travelled south to recce the site but, once there, I had strong feelings of deja vous after spotting Jaguar’s Technical Centre nearby, and it took me all of 10 seconds to realise that it was the very job I completed the drawings for nearly a quarter of a century earlier! There it was, standing proudly as if waiting for my return!”

Paul was working as a young engineer in London at the time but spotting the large car facility got HBPW’s man thinking.

“These days I travel up and down the country and everywhere I look I can see civil engineering projects I have had a hand in.

“Going towards the east coast the Immingham Rail Freight Terminal (IRFT)  dominates the skyline. I spent weeks, and more than the odd sleepless night working on that one; it is so big that the IRFT can be tracked by satellites above the earth!”

Then there is the footbridge across the A1 at Great Ponton in Lincolnshire and the lifting bridge in Torquay’s inner harbour, both of which felt the tip of Paul’s pencil on a drawing board more than two decades ago!

“I had a work placement student with me recently and I started to feel old. The further south we drove the more I found myself saying, ‘that’s one of mine…..oh, and that one!’. When you put four decades between yourself and university graduation day it stands to reason that you will have covered a lot of engineering ground over a lifetime.

“However, it is quite nice to know that 20 or 30 years on from when you completed a particular job, it is still standing and in daily use. That, for me, is what engineering is all about.”