Long reads

Construction News’ analysis shows that some executives have seen their pay packages fall while others are celebrating heights never seen before The median pay for a chief executive at a FTSE 100 company reached £4.19m in 2023, the highest level on record, according to the High Pay Centre (HPC).. The…

Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate (and most violent) movie, 1972’s Frenzy - captures a lost London. Set largely in Covent Garden, it shows the area – these days a tourist trap – as it had stood for the previous 300 years - a bustling flower and fruit market. At the time of…

This year, the Labour Party’s annual conference played host to 29 fringe events containing the word “housing” in the title. A further seven mentioned the word “infrastructure”. In crowded rooms across the conference zone on Liverpool’s dockside, delegates crammed in to hear the new army of excited “generation rent” MPs…

Last month, the global construction community gathered at The Barbican Centre in London for the 2024 Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) International Conference to address a key question – should we continue to build new buildings, or should we focus on renewing the ones we already have?…

Andre Redinger has a lot to say. Via a video call, he speaks to Construction News from his South African homeland less than 24 hours after ISG, the company he spent six months trying to buy, announced it was filing for administration. The previous evening, ISG chief executive Zoe Price…

Rising turnover and slumping profit characterise the CN100 2024 index of top UK contractors, but the outlook remains broadly positive There is a saying among economists that “if you torture the data long enough, it will confess”. At Construction News we like to think that our interrogation techniques reveal the…

Retrofit might not be new, but it’s going through a purple patch due to net zero concerns. CN asks how contractors are mitigating the risks on cut-and-carve projects It’s a bright summer’s day and Bam Construction is busy installing period furniture at a striking 1960s central London modernist office block…

Regulatory changes are driving developers to look more closely at material reuse rather than disposal, but old habits are hard to break, finds Kristina Smith Almost overnight, as the world emerged from Covid, Roy Fishwick noticed a change in attitudes towards reused steel. “Back in 2016, 2017, I was talking…

From bricks made of mushrooms to energy-generating paint, Construction News takes a look at some of the innovative building materials and products set to transform the industry Bio-concrete The Global Concrete and Cement Association says that concrete can self-heal to a degree. But one way to increase concrete’s self-healing ability…

Safety and environmental pressures are leading to a wave of innovation in materials development – but what are the barriers to getting new products to site? Innovation is, of course, desirable in any industry at any time. It enables companies to improve their products or services, thereby better serving their…