Brian Yates is moving to London later this year, but it is not his first time living in the capital. When Stantec’s new managing director for the UK and Ireland was 20, he spent a summer working in the city as a fishmonger at Selfridges. The Canada native loved almost everything about London -  “had I not had a girlfriend waiting for me back in Nova Scotia, I would have stayed” - except for the jellied eels. 

“They wanted me to taste everything that we were selling,” he explains. “The taste didn’t really stick with me. But what I really didn’t like was the consistency where, because it’s an eel, you’ve got these ribs in each segment,” he remembers, shuddering.

Yates is now returning to the city in somewhat better circumstances. He has been tasked with overseeing a huge expansion of Stantec’s presence in the region. Labour’s moonshot pledge to decarbonise the UK’s energy grid by 2030 has opened a window for the engineering firm, dangling the opportunity of vast amounts of work for engineers and infrastructure specialists in the energy sector. 

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