More than just a QS

Quantity surveying is about to lose one of its few true stars. This week Paul Morrell, the veteran Davis Langdon man who has built up a unique reputation in the industry as a thinker and a supporter of fine design, announced that he is to resign.

The timing seems appropriate: Wednesday marked the 35th anniversary of the day he joined the company as a fresh-faced 23 year old. It was also the 92nd birthday of his father, who had earned his living as a contractor.

Although Morrell Jr considered becoming a lawyer, and briefly studied for the bar, he eventually followed his childhood ambition and entered his father’s industry. “I flirted with the idea of law, but I chose construction as it has a product.”

He believes he was the company’s first employee to have studied to be a QS, and his brightness told – he became a partner within five years. In 1988, he joined the main board, and became senior partner in 1998. In the five memorable years he held the top job, he reorganised the company into an international network.

But it was Morrell’s ability to construct high-quality buildings to time and budget that made his name. Architects agree that he has been a joy to work with. Ken Shuttleworth, the former director of Foster and Partners, said in 1997: “Paul is brilliant. He’s more than just a QS – he’s part of the design team and comments on things beyond his discipline.”

It is not surprising, then, that Morrell names Shuttleworth as one of the two “proudest relationships” he has in construction.

The other was with his great friend Sir Stuart Lipton, the former chairman of Stanhope. Morrell worked with both on the ITN building on Gray’s Inn Road in London during the 1990s, a scheme that required 400,000ft2 of office space to be built in one year – and came in on budget.

‘Brute of a building’: Morrell hopes to be remembered for the Tate Modern

I’m not going to stop. I’m going to live what’s known as a portfolio life

Paul Morrell

Along with ITN, it is the Tate Modern that Morrell hopes to be remembered for. The Tate was a particularly difficult job, “a brute of a building” that had to be completed for £134m, right down to “the red carpet for the Queen at the opening ceremony”, he laughs. “That’s the big difference in my lifetime. It’s not just about the construction cost of the building, but the total investment that QSs have to deal with.”

He will also be remembered for his work with the British Council for Offices, which he co-founded and led for a year. He has been rewarded for his work: he was appointed a Cabe commissioner in 2001 – a rare honour for a QS – and named one of the 40 inaugural members of the Building Hall of Fame.

As Shuttleworth says, Morrell’s expertise extends beyond quantity surveying. He was appointed chairman of dance company Siobhan Davies two months ago and has served on the board of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He has a passion for the stage: “I go to the opera once every two months, dance twice a month and the theatre twice a month.”

Not that he will leave the construction industry behind. Morrell will be 59 when he leaves Davis Langdon next April, and will continue to work for the company as a consultant.

“I’m not going to stop, that’s for sure,” he laughs. “I’m going to live what’s known as a ‘portfolio life’, working on an assignment basis.”

One of these assignments is a rather cushy-sounding job on a £2bn resort scheme in the Bahamas – he ran a company set up by Davis Langdon to advise on the project, and he will continue to help with it.

However, little else about his future is clear yet. But he doesn’t intend to go on and on like that other great name in the discipline, James Nisbet, 86, who spends a few days a month at the firm he founded.

“He’s a legend,” says Morrell of Nisbet. “But I won’t be doing that. I don’t want to be haunting the corridors here.”