Capital Ventures
We are entrepreneurial developers and placemakers who create long-term value for people, places and projects.
I'm a Quantity Surveyor on the project looking after the financial side to each
of the packages. So, we're now looking at the next phase of managing subcontractors on site,
from changes to monthly valuations, which is really good for my development almost personally
because it's a new sort of phase of how Quantity Surveying works. I've gone through the phase of
procurement and everything that comes with that and now it's about managing the subcontractors.
The packages I'm mainly focusing on are the partitions and the joinery. Now, internally,
these two packages go quite closely with each other so it helps that I can understand
both sides of subcontractors. The project is made up of six blocks ranging from Top Shed,
which you can see behind me, all the way down to the Round Yard at
the end. In total the brickwork has circa 800,000 bricks. We've also poured around
14,000 meters cube of concrete as well. The project consists of 395 apartments. This is
one of our show flats. We're delivering this project for Sir Robert McAlpine Capital Ventures,
with the end funder of Legal & General. The project is a team effort and we're also
working very closely with our Architects, Glancy Nicholls Architects, and Faithful+Gould who are
the client-side Professional Quantity Surveyors. I finished the graduate programme maybe six months
ago now so it was a two-year process for me where we joined a cohort of maybe 20 of us. Throughout
that time we did a leadership programme and an apprenticeship. We had a couple of trips up to
the Lake District which was really good fun and we also did two weeks down in Birmingham where we
undertook an introduction to construction course. For me that was really interesting because,
for a quantity surveyor, I can always tell you that we always say "it should never cost
that much" or "it should never take that long". However, when you actually do it for yourself you
find that it does take that long sometimes and it should cost that much. So, it gives a real good
feel for how the construction industry works rather than just sitting behind your desk all
the time and go "that isn't right". And I think, for me, as a graduate it's allowed me to develop
a lot more. I'm really pleased with the level of development I've made on this project. I
felt when I first arrived at Sir Robert McAlpine I knew a bit about what the industry was but I
didn't necessarily understand how the whole life cycle of a project works. I feel as though I've
got that development now, and it's about using the skills I've learned on this project and upskilling
myself and taking on more responsibility, higher value packages on the next job I'm working on.
