Sport and leisure

Gold

Name
Tony Mingoia MCIOB
Company
Kier Southern
Project
3,200m² leisure complex and stadium. Staines Football Club, Middlesex
Contract
£4.6m, JCT 98, 48 weeks

Tony Mingoia made this contract work by winning the respect of the workforce with a no-nonsense management style. In the light of the flood that threatened to flush the programme down the drain, building the project on time was a remarkable achievement, particularly as the chairman of the client organisation just happened to run a major electrical contractor employed on the site. What could so easily have been a nightmare relationship turned into one of the project’s strengths as Mingoia’s sheer professionalism impressed the chairman as much as it did all the other subcontractors.

Living just a few doors away from the football ground, Mingoia was a well-known face to local residents. Once the project – a new football stadium and home for Staines FC that incorporated a health and fitness centre – was up and running, monthly project meetings soon became the norm. Mingoia also seized the opportunity to meet the client’s financial backer, who would regularly fly in from Scotland, at the airport and discuss the project with him then and there.

With the viability of piling conditions unclear in the initial stages and a change in the identity of the project financial backer, this contract was from day one a complicated and protracted affair. And then, as construction was nearing completion, the wettest December on record put the Staines site under several feet of floodwater. It was a massive setback, and could have been disasterous for the swimming pool had the team not installed tension piles in advance to obviate any risk of high flood water.

Mingoia coped admirably with the huge volume of unanticipated work required to clean up the sludge and dry out the site. And the completion date was non-negotiable — the stadium, the pitch, a 300-seater stand and the dressing and treatment rooms simply had to be ready in time for the start of the new football season.

Silver

Name
John Boughton
Company
Formerly of CH Pearce, now with Sir Robert McAlpine
Project
Cycling centre and race track. National Velodrome, Newport
Contract
£6.7m, JCT 98, 46 weeks

The complexity of this structure, coupled with exceptionally exacting tolerance requirements, a problematic site location and a very tight budget, presented John Boughton with some significant challenges.

While there was easy access and the site was greenfield, it was also adjacent to public-sector housing and close to a football stadium. But the really difficult aspect of the location was that the water table was so high that Boughton had to pile the foundations.

Nor was there any room for manoeuvre in the budget. But even though frills were out of the question, with the finishings coming from the lower reaches of the market, Boughton achieved astonishing quality with fair-faced blockwork. Painstaking attention to installation kept the blocks really clean and precise, and prevented the usual snots from appearing, with the result that the finish looks fabulous.

Boughton’s real triumph, though, is a technical one. The UK has virtually no expertise in the construction of velodromes – cycle race tracks where the degree of banking fluctuates massively over the oval course, whose curves are more sharply inclined than the straights. Getting it right means being no more than half a millimetre out on materials and installation.

And in the case of the Newport Velodrome, the fine tolerances were made even harder to achieve by the use of three very different materials in its construction: steel for the frame of the building, in situ concrete for the track foundation, and timber for the track itself and its supporting beams. The differential of movement between these materials tends to go in opposite directions, complicating an already ferociously difficult specification. And once the track installation was complete, Boughton had to maintain a strict regime of dust control and excess to protect the finished track.

Completing the project on time and to the highest possible quality exceeded just about everyone’s expectations and represents a tremendous achievement.

Commended

Nathan Bryant Mace, Paul Mock Wallis, Paul Norman Midas Construction