Pryke on his bike

Andrew Pryke, Capita Architecture’s Design Director, and Capita Symonds’ Andrew Wheldon completed the King Sturge Property Triathlon at Dorney Lake, Eaton, recently.

The Property Triathlon is now in its third year and has already firmly established itself as one of the top five UK triathlons by size. Co-sponsored by Property Week, the event to date has raised over £500,000 for charity and has seen more than 3,500 people take part.

This year’s event included a 750m open water swim, 12 mile bike ride and three mile run. Andrew chalked up a time of 1 hr 15min 3 sec, putting him in eight place out of over 100 in the 45-49 year old category, 16th out of approximately 220 in the 40-49 category, and 97th out of 1155 overall.

Andrew Wheldon notched up a highly respectable time of 1 hour 30 min 15 sec.

Well done to both Andrews!

Blogs, Twitter, social networking: your new business tools

The construction industry is proving that social media and digital marketing is not just for consumer brands - with a wide variety of businesses now turning to digital channels to promote their business and communicate with potential clients.

Construction Manager magazine has pulled together some thoughts and tips from industry professionals including how to use Twitter, LinkedIn and Blogs.

• Read the full article on the Construction Manager website

......and we're mentioned in there too! ;-)

Carlisle Staff Give a Helping Hand

A team of volunteers from our Carlisle office recently renovated a local garden for a charity in Harker. Ten members of Capita Symonds staff took part in the project over two half days at Heathlands Farm, part of the Glenmore Trust.

The site is run by Glenmore Opportunities, a Social Enterprise that provides support and development for adults with disabilities.The users at the centre outlined what they wanted in the garden, which was designed by landscape architect David Richards, including plants to attract butterflies, something to deter rabbits, and a gnome.

After weeding, the volunteers completed the garden with a tidy up of the overgrown site, and adding new plants. Plans for the future of the Glenmore site include a tea room, farm shop and nature trails.

David Richards said: “All of the volunteers are really happy with how the garden has turned out. We put in a lot of hard work and we are delighted that the day centre users at Glenmore have a nice front garden they can enjoy throughout the year.”

The garden renovation is part of the Carlisle office’s ongoing Community Engagement plan which it is hoped will take on larger projects in the future.

Before

The volunteers

The finished article

Thank you to all the volunteers!

Capita Bobrowski engineers Goodwood Festival of Speed sculpture for 5th time.

Capita Bobrowski (our structural engineering brand) provided structural engineering design services for the spectacular central sculpture at last weekend’s Goodwood Festival of Speed.

This year's innovative display was sponsored by Audi in its centenary year, and was designed especially for the event by renowned sculptor Gerry Judah. Celebrating Audi’s achievements in motorsports, the sculpture features the legendary 1937 Auto Union Streamliner and the recently launched R8 V10 sports car at either end of a dramatic 'swoosh' of tyre tracks, as if they are driving off into the sky.

Although the 44 tonne, 32metre high structure is entirely fabricated from steel, Capita Bobrowski utilised in-house software that was originally written for tensile fabric to provide the complex cutting patterns needed for the steel plates that are welded to the central core tube.

Have a look at pictures of the sculpture on Flickr

Capita Bobrowski were also involved in the last 4 sculptures at the event:

• 2008 - Land Rover
• 2007 - Toyota
• 2006 - Renault
• 2005 - Honda

Urban Vision Staff lend a helping hand to St Anne's Hospice

Eight members of our Urban Vision team in Salford took part in a gardening project at St Ann’s Hospice recently.

The hospice – Urban Vision’s chosen charity for 2009 – is the largest hospice in Greater Manchester and provides specialist care for people who have progressive and life-threatening illnesses – as well as support for their carers and families.

With summer approaching, the aim of the day was to dramatically improve the gardens and outdoor break areas for the patients and their families. A couple of hours of mowing, digging and planting transformed the hospice’s surroundings, much to the delight of Andy, the hospice’s caretaker!

The volunteers insisted that they’ll be back again next year with their gardening gloves and spades in tow.

Back row: Paul Clayden, Cathy Mitchell, Toni Bullen, Stephen Lawton.
Front row: Amanda Cordina, Hayley Watson.

Links:

• Go to the St Anne's Hospice Website
• Find out more about Urban Vision
• Go to the Urban Vision website

New edition of Renewal

Just to let you all know, the latest version of our update magazine Renewal is now online.

Click on the front cover, below, to open:

In this edition: News, school security, M6 Extension, the green economy, Shuttleworth College, Hoddinott Hall, urban trees

Mountian Bike Trail Design Service Launched

We like a bit of variety here at Capita Symonds, especially when it comes to the services we offer. And now we have even more exciting expertise to offer!

Our Countryside Management team has just launched a new service - designing mountain bike trails, in conjunction with internationally renowned mountain bike course sculptor Phil Saxena and specialist contractor Dinsdale Moorland services.

Links:

• Find out more about the new service
• 'Meet' Phil Saxena

Video:

Watch riders in action on the Phil Saxena designed Pietermaritzburg course in South Africa

Success for Capita Symonds at the 2009 Microsoft Challenge.

2 teams from Capita Symonds took part in this years Microsoft Challenge. The challenge is one of the UK’s most gruelling corporate events and this year was held in the Cambrian mountains near Aberystwyth, Wales.

Our teams, lead by Tom Davies and John Kinnear from the East Grinstead office, finished 21st and 27th out of 93 teams. The teams were drawn from across the business with individuals from Procter Street, Fetter Lane, Carlisle, Sefton, Blackburn, Cheadle Hulme and Manchester.

The challenge involved 8 stages spread over 4 days and nights including mountain biking, pentango (a strategic board game), running, canoeing and constructing a device to retrieve an egg from behind a barrier 8 ft away! All of the stages were extremely complex and required a great deal of planning and strategic thinking in addition to the physical element in order to score well.

As part of the challenge teams had to raise money for the NSPCC and between our teams we managed to raise a total of over £3,400 for the charity through a combination of personal sponsorship, selling raffle tickets and matched funding from Capita Group. The grand total for the event was more than £435,000 for the NSPCC, resulting in an emotional speech of thanks from Sir Christopher Kelly (chairman of the NSPCC) at the prize giving ceremony.

Our MD (and team member) Jonathan Goring commented on the event that:
“The bond of teamwork was immense and the way everyone supported others before themselves drove us all to find new reserves. Thanks to all of the team members for making us all proud ”

The teams would like to thank all their colleagues, family and friends for their generous encouragement and support in helping them work towards their fundraising target for NSPCC.

We are planning to enter more adventure races and other outdoor events throughout the year and all Capita Symonds staff are welcome to join the fun. Our ambition is to send both a mens and a mixed team to next year’s Microsoft Challenge event in Aviemore, Scotland.

A BIG THANKS to everyone who took part and everyone who donated!

You can still make a donation - go to www.justgiving.com/teamcapitasymonds

Have a look at the photos:

Photos from the Microsoft Challenge

View more OpenOffice presentations from CapitaSymonds.

Capita Symonds works on Take That's stage set

We've worked on some really interesting and varied projects recently.

And they don't get much more exciting than helping to create the stage set for a massive arena tour! We provided structural engineering advice on the stage sets for the Take That's current 'Circus' tour which opened in Sunderland.

Director Malcolm Richards worked closely with set builders Brilliant Stages and artistic designer Mark Fisher.

The action-packed show features jugglers, clowns, trapeze artists, tightrope walkers and drummerboys and a huge red big top tent. The pièce de résistance is a huge silver elephant which carries the boys (or should we call them men now?!) across the stage.

The tour continues with dates in Cardiff, Glasgow, Manchester and London. See Take That's website for more details.

The team also provided structural engineering advice for AC/DC's 'Black Ice' tour, which has dates in London, Glasgow and Dublin this month.

Find out more:

A full article, including an interview with Malcolm Richards can be found in this week's Building Magazine (issue 23 - 12.06.09)

Links:

• Read more on Building's website (the article mentioned above, minus the interview with Malcolm Richards)
• Look at pictures from the tour on Flickr
• Watch clips of the stage show on YouTube
• Go to Take That's official website
• Got to the Careers in Engineering supplement of The Telegraph - featuring Malcolm Richards, and the AC/DC tour
• See the AC/DC tour dates

Have a look at the elephant in action:

Health and Safety Don'ts

We all know Health and Safety is something to be taken very seriously in the workplace and on-site. So check out these photos on how NOT to do it:

Go to Construction Space's Rogues Gallery

Please don't attempt any of these!

PS - we can offer excellent Health and Safety training as well as Leisure and Event safety Consultancy. (And you are ever unfortunately enough to suffer an accident, we offer a Health and Safety Expert Witness service.)