The London property developer Telford Homes has seen its profits more than double in the latest sign of surging demand for bricks and mortar in the capital.
Telford Homes is the latest homebuilder to benefit from the mismatch between demand and supply in London, with Wednesday's announcement of bumper profits following spectacular results from Barratt, Bovis and Persimmon earlier in the year.
Continue reading...Leaked documents reveal a crisis in the £15bn Crossrail project, Europe's largest construction site, with industrial relations close to collapse and workers too scared to report injuries for fear of being sacked. Crossrail's managers are accused of photographing or videoing contractors' staff who may be in danger and emailing it to others "with unmasked glee".
The culture at the site of the east-west rail link is "almost entirely counterproductive" to delivering the project safely, on time and on budget, according to a damning internal analysis seen by the Observer. It adds that injured workers are "afraid to report due to the likelihood of being laid off".
Continue reading...Trade unions and human rights campaigners have criticised the failure of the United Arab Emirates to address the exploitation and mistreatment of migrant workers building a flagship complex of five-star resorts and museums.
The International Trade Union Confederation, Human Rights Watch and campaign group Gulf Labor expressed disappointment after the second annual audit of conditions on Abu Dhabi's Saadiyat Island, where a new Louvre and the world's largest Guggenheim museum are being built.
Continue reading...Recessions don't usually create distinctive new spaces. The "new" capital skyline now under construction is mostly made up of buildings shelved during the first phase of the Great Recession, and at this rate London as it "should" have been in 2010 won't be finished for some years yet something even more true of the cancelled skyscrapers of Leeds or Manchester.
Yet there is one obvious offspring of the collapse of the old model: the pop-up. The japery of the term oh, look, what used to be a wasteland has now got an organic hot dog company on it! makes clear the sort of thing we're dealing with, part of the mental regression of a generation elsewhere bent on reviving cupcakes. Pop-ups are fun! A railway yard with boutique shops! A "shopping village" on a council estate! An arthouse cinema in an abandoned petrol station! A burger bar in an Asian women's advice centre! (The last of these, recently opened in Hackney as "The Advisory", is surely one of the most offensive: the decay of social provision given a fun, ironic spin.)
Continue reading...Britain's biggest trade union is locked in a campaign with the bosses of the largest engineering project in Europe over claims that workers have been blacklisted for raising health and safety concerns. When I heard from the Unite union about the situation faced by Frank Morris, an electrician who says he was sacked by Crossrail for trade union activity, it reminded me of the time I was thrown in jail, and the suffering my comrades had to endure, for being prepared to stand up to our bosses.
Believe it or not, acting was never my career choice. I got into the entertainment game because I was a victim of blacklisting. In the end I got lucky, but thousands of workers from the construction industry had their lives and the lives of their families destroyed as a result of this murky practice.
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