Clear October light shines through the huge windows and it is possibly one of the nicest days Basingstoke has seen for a while. It's certainly one of the nicest days for Laing O'Rourke's Nelson, who is showing me around the £131m Festival Place shopping centre, which won him the coveted Construction Manager of the Year Award the night before.
A year ago, almost to the day, you would have seen Nelson and the architect armed with brushes, sweeping up at 6am in advance of 100,000 or so Basingstoke citizens surging in to see their new town centre. Nelson remembers it vividly, and not just that day, but the whole six years during which Festival Place was his overriding obsession.
As a project, it reshaped the soul of Basingstoke. It reshaped the soul of Malcolm Nelson, too.
Basingstoke town centre was a mess. In Porchester Square, two flues from a subterranean swimming pool polluted the air with chlorine fumes. Police had to evacuate the public on at least one occasion. The landscape was dominated by massive, ugly concrete ramps that ferried cars to the roof-top parking lots. The car parks themselves had stalactites growing from the eroding concrete on the ceilings.
Now it's a different world. Designers have respected human sensibilities. You don't feel dwarfed because for most of the perimeter you see only two storeys of elevation. The number of shops, bars and restaurants has shot up and there is not a Poundstretcher among them. Visitor traffic is up 22% since opening last year, and people seem in a good mood.
Especially Malcolm Nelson. Despite having had only an hour's sleep the night before, this quiet man is on a roll. He can zoom in for detail or out for the so-called 'helicopter view' on demand. He knows the place down to the last duct. We narrowly avoid a visit to the services room.
"Sorry," he says. "I could go on about this place for days."
Nelson calls Basingtoke's Festival Place his magnum opus. All construction managers are obsessed by their jobs, but how many can remember the day they first got involved in a project? We're talking the actual date, here. He does. It was 11 August 1996 when client Grosvenor Developments first engaged Laing to provide pre-contract and programming advice. At that time, he was the regional planning manager for Laing Eastern.
Grosvenor was bidding for a job with the town to redevelop the centre, which was dominated by an outdated shopping mall. From early 1998, Nelson led a small Laing team helping the client write a project management strategy, establish a construction method and develop the cost plan.
Being fluent in the language of considerate construction, Nelson also helped Grosvenor convince the local authority that it could revamp the town centre without blighting the area for years or hurting the livelihoods of the traders. He used his expertise to demonstrate to Grosvenor that their original draft master programme was almost three months too short.
He'd been involved with two shopping centres before and he further impressed the client with his understanding of development issues such as land acquisition, enabling works and agreements with third parties.
It was a curious situation, because although Nelson was de facto leader of the Laing team he was still regarded as a career planner and therefore inexperienced in senior line management. For a time he reported to a more senior manager, brought in to direct the project, but after a year or so the man left the company.
Finally, on 8 May 2000, he got the call to attend a meeting at the regional HQ, where he was formally asked to assume the project director's role.
"I thought for about five seconds before saying yes," he said.
When you’ve got people above you, you can delegate up. when you don’t, you are answerable
Malcolm Nelson
He was eager for the role, but he did feel the weight?
"You know it's your neck on the line. You have good people around you but ultimately you're responsible."
He took to keeping a notepad on his bedside table. He couldn't get back to sleep otherwise.
It was a massively complex job to manage. All jobs are, but this wasn't just a shopping mall, it was a town centre. It may have been ugly and car-oriented, but for thousands of people it was home and work. Nelson had to coax people, busses, cars, even sewerage out of the way at various stages without interrupting the long-established ebb and flow of the town.
There were nine phased possessions, 104 practical completions and nearly 70 significant packages. With a 2km site boundary and with constantly changing public interfaces, this required a great deal of control.
Nelson had more important clients than Grosvenor. Most crucial were the mall's tenants, who had businesses to run. Nelson managed the job without the need to make rental concessions. In one of the more impressive feats, shops could do business as usual while munchers and Kubotas demolished and carted away four storeys of a concrete car park above.
Being a planner was both an advantage and a disadvantage. On the down side, he had a tendency to get bogged down in particulars.
"Most would say I was too involved in the detail," he said. "It was one of the main learning experiences for me, stepping back to let others handle it."
On the other hand, he had the planner's eye for crucial events, so he knew where and when to bring his political skill to bear.
Nelson is not new to being a manager. At one stage as regional planning manager he had 60 people working for him. But he admits that managing a part of the construction process is a totally different kettle of fish to managing a specific project.
"When you've got people above you, you can delegate up. When you don't, you got to have the answers."
Having caught the bug, it looks like he'll be staying on the sharp end of construction management. He is now leading the team building an eight-storey college in Southend on Sea.
Despite being quietly spoken, you can tell that Nelson is very comfortable with his new role in life.
Source
Construction Manager
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