Welcome

I’ve been doing the same thing, more or less, for a decade now.

When someone is kind enough to ask me what I do for a living, the range of answers I give start around the vague, innacurate, but easily digestable “I sort of design buildings”.

I’d like to take you from that sketchy description forward, to paint a picture of what I really do,

I am a Structural Engineer, but not as you probably know them, if you already have an idea of what one is.

If a person has an idea of what a Structural Engineer is, the image they would likely have in their mind would reflect a Consultant Structural Engineer; someone who works across projects in many fields. They might come to your house to advise you about a domestic extension, or do high level design of an office building, or design bridges. They would work across multiple materials; reinforced concrete, timber, steelwork, masonry or even more esoteric materials like structural glass.

Quite by accdent, I sidestepped this life in favour of specialisation.

Shortly after completing my degree I found myself working almost exclusively in structural steelwork, starting with a two-year stint at a now defunct structural steelwork fabricator in West Yorkshire specialising in Design and Build. This is where my journey into specialisation began. In the run-up to its collapse (see: Global Financial Crisis of 2007-8), I was offered a job at a small consulting practice in my home city, which I gladly took. Almost a year to the day later, a former colleage approached me to join him at another fabricator, this time in North Yorkshire, and there I have remained for the last 8 years.

The life of an engineer working for a fabricator is very different to that of a consultant, and as I write this welcome piece, I believe that difference is one of the main topics I want to explore here. It is exciting that public awareness of engineering as a whole is increasing, so I hope that I can contribute to a modest bump in the awareness of my small, and perhaps overlooked field.

The first question I must now ask myself is “does anyone care?” followed swiftly by “is this even interesting?”. The answers I give myself are “well yes, I do” and “I truly hope so” respectively. I don’t know who will be keeping score for me, but whoever they may be, I hope they are kind enough to let me down gently if I’m wrong.