March 2024 marks Link’s fifth birthday, having been established in March 2019.

With projects such as Lyons Park, Milton Keynes Western Expansion and The Belfry (more to come on this project soon!), Link has cemented its position as a trusted multi-disciplinary engineering consultancy, supporting successful delivery of development schemes from due diligence and planning support through to onsite support and completion, including adoption of infrastructure assets.

Business planning, investing in team growth & development and expanding service offerings have all played a part in Link’s successful growth from two to over 30 (and growing!)  team members and a healthy turnover.

And there are clear plans for helping clients achieve their goals in the future, with new Birmingham and Manchester offices recently opened and a strong pipeline of work.

Nick Moore, Director: “When Link was established, I could envisage what its first five years would look like and to see this being realised, plus a lot more, is incredibly rewarding. With ever-enhancing capabilities and service offerings, I am focused on taking the business forward to achieve further successes for our clients.”

Robert Gill, Director: “One thing I’m immensely proud of is the growth of our team; to see our team members grow in their careers and in their personal lives, and know we’ve played a role in this, is just fantastic.”

Of course, Link’s structural team (formerly MBCE Projects Limited), has a much longer history, having been established in January 1993, which means there is lots of business and engineering expertise on hand as Link continues to grow.

How we can help you

Do you have a development you’re looking for advice on?

We can assist with planning support, civil and structural engineering and building investigation, so why not speak with our team on 0121 716 0100 or contact Nick, Robert or any of our team today,

Our team visited the Big Birmingham Bake to celebrate the special birthdays of two team members.

The bake challenge was Raspberry Pavlova. We were split into pairs and given our instructions and ingredients. There were several elements; the meringue, the filling and of course the decoration. Lots of laughter and friendly competition quickly ensued.

The head baker was very impressed each pair was able to bring to the table a presentable pavlova for judging. After the winners were announced we celebrated with some drinks and then headed home with our creations.

If you’re considering a team activity or a meet up with friends, this is definitely something we’d recommend.

One of our senior engineers Val recently attended a Social Value session orgainsed by Constructing Excellence. It certainly brought the importance of the role Link can play in social value front of mind.

Firstly, what is social value? Our understanding of social value is how companies can measure the meaningful contributions to society they make. There is lots to consider including sustainable growth, looking after the environment, improving equality and eradicating poverty. We’ve found the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals a useful inspiration for how we can make a difference.

So, what are we doing specifically at Link?

As a business, there are many ways we know we can make a difference.

1.We’ve signed up to Zellar, a platform which enables us to measure and improve our  sustainability.  We’ve educated ourselves on the impact our business decisions can have on the environment for example the carbon footprint of our website, how ethical our banking providers are and our options for accessing green energy.

2.We’re a young business and we like supporting young people. It’s been inspiring to spend time at university careers fairs and speak to students about their options and what it’s like being a consulting engineer.  We’ve offered work experience opportunities to two school students to date, and during the summer of 2023 we’ve invited three more students to spend a week in our office to gain some insight into engineering.

3.We have supported our local community in several ways. Previously a total of £2.5k has been raised for the Guide Dogs for the Blind and our team supported the Canal and River Trust in which several planted areas of the central Birmingham canal area were improved. In the last twelve months we donated over £600 to the Bodie Hodges Foundation, a family bereavement charity.

As engineers, how can we deliver on social value?  From designing sustainable buildings and infrastructure to considering solutions to the client crisis, there are lots of ways we can make an impact, and in fact, already have. A couple of examples are:

Removing the need for additional infrastructure work

During the design of an access road for a residential development, it was discovered that the approved layout did not align with the council’s expansion plans for the area. This posed a risk of significant public expenditure and disruption, as the new road would need to be demolished and rebuilt in a few years at a slightly different location and level. To avoid this outcome, our team, led by Val, facilitated discussions between our client and the LHA to find a better solution. Ultimately, we were able to reach an agreement to construct only one road, which saved millions of pounds and spared the local residents inconvenience.

Unlocking land for our clients

One of our key clients engaged Link to explore opportunities to help them unlock one of their sites. Our Associate Chris worked with a specialist flood risk modelling consultancy, to recalculate flood risk and enable the client to realise greater development potential on their existing land, as opposed to needing to consider using additional land and more resources.

We know we’ve got much more to learn. At the moment we’re working on our Carbon Reduction Plan, so watch this space.

Has this article sparked an interest? 

We’re happy to chat more. To get in touch simply call our office on 0121 716 0100 or email mail@linkeng.co.uk today.

Due to growing demand from our client base we have recently strengthened our structural engineering team by recruiting several new hires.

We’ve been delighted to welcome Paul Humphreys, Associate, Fez Osman, Senior Engineer, Sherine Walrond, Technician and Rachael Chambers, Office Manager.

Nick Hirschman, Director: “With our pipeline of work looking strong we decided to further invest in our team to continue our quality client delivery. I am delighted with the individuals who’ve joined our team and looking forward to seeing them progress their careers at Link”

Would you like to know more about working at Link and what opportunities might be open to you? Find out more on our careers page.

We were very excited when the opportunity arose from one of our key clients Countryside Partnerships to host two of their junior team members within our team on three occasions. Adina and Charles, from Countryside’s Development Planning team, were both very engaging and joined in well with our team.

One of our Graduate Engineers, Jas Johal, took the lead on supporting their experience across three days and asked them how they found it….

Charles: “Initially I expected there to be more members of the team such is their quality of work. You can pick up a Link drawing and tell it is a Link drawing from the way everything is portrayed and set out in an easy to follow manner.”

Adina: “Link produce a high quality of work and the team is full of a lot of valuable experience. There is a great team atmosphere and everyone wants to help each other to move forward together. I now have a much greater understanding and appreciation of what goes on behind the drawings.”

For the Link team, having our clients with us in the office was a great opportunity to showcase how we work and reinforce our positive working relationships.

Moving forward we’re exploring the possibility of sending junior members from our team to Countryside to gain a further understanding and appreciation of our clients’ needs and ways of working.

Our team attended propski in Val Thorens this year, making it the third time our representatives have enjoyed the French Alps and had the opportunity to meet property professionals. This means we’ve attended all propski events since we were established in 2019 and we fully intend to keep going.

Chris Hadjivassiliou and Karishma Lally had a chance to hone their skiing skills, while meeting people across the property sector, including logistics and residential developers, project managers, cost consultants, architects, planning specialists and building surveyors.

Chris and Karishma attended the mountain meal on the slopes, the last supper Mexican experience and numerous apres ski drinks with other attendees.

We are looking forward to catching up with all our new contacts over the next few weeks and hope that we will have the chance to meet up with everyone we missed this time in future propski events.

Can we help with your structural and civil design needs?

Get in touch with us via our contact us form to arrange a friendly chat.

A personal overview by Mark Brock

How can it be the case that the Link Structural Engineering team turned 30 years old in January 2023 when Link Engineering didn’t even exist 30 years ago?

The answer is that in February 2022, the practice “MBCE Projects Ltd” (soon to be 30 years old) changed its name to Link Engineering and joined forces with the dynamic, vibrant Civil Engineering team after several years of joint working. Now, all that knowledge and experience is being applied across all Link Engineering activities.

Where it all began

Back in 1992, I was a young, chartered engineer with a big mortgage, loving wife, and a small baby.  I thought I had a good job with the substantial but old Birmingham practice of James Carrington and Partners.  I was a structural engineer in charge of their Marks & Spencer work (new build and modifications) and developing a healthy market (building on a massive Carrington track record) for them in manufacturing (Land Rover) with a few other projects (Gaydon Motor Museum) thrown in. 

I was, though, something of a new broom in an old-fashioned business.  Before Carrington’s and after my PhD, I had worked at Arups and DGI on a wide range of projects, both large and small. These included the Birmingham Convention Centre, Pavilions Shopping Centre, Black Country Limestone mine evaluation, British Gas R&D headquarters, apartment blocks, hospitals, nursing homes, and Jaguar Cars’ heavy press shop. 

Unfortunately, there was a recession in 1992 and many of the Carrington directors I worked with most closely were encouraged to retire.  I felt safe, though, because I was personally earning fees greater than many times my salary for the practice.  It came as a bit of a shock to realise that my face didn’t fit with the remaining directors, and I was made redundant.  I had a stark choice: set up a new business or try to land a good job in a market where, all around me, others were losing theirs. 

So, MBCE was born!  No work to start me off, no money in the bank, and just a vague feeling that if I could earn decent fees for others then I should be able to do it for myself.

The beginnings of a business

The early days weren’t a great deal of fun. Really just a case of doing anything (including house and shop condition surveys) to create some income and putting as much effort as I could into talking to people to let them know I was open for business, not a natural skill for most engineers. 

What I soon discovered was that even people who knew me were very reticent about giving a start-up structural engineering business any decent projects to get my teeth into.  It was quite the breakthrough when I won a project at Wolverhampton University to remodel an office building! At the same time, I also worked as a sub-consultant on Sears Retail Park, Shirley, to co-ordinate services and road diversions. 

From those early springboard projects, I managed to create enough market confidence to get back to trading on my former structural experience, leading to work modifying large town centre shopping centres around the UK for incoming retailers and cutting and carving industrial buildings.  The Sears team became Helical Retail and new out of town shopping centre developments around the UK followed.

The early days were a bit hand-to-mouth regarding the other members of the MBCE team, which mostly involved working with people I had known in my previous work. 

I was always particularly keen to have robust quality processes and became dogmatic about ensuring that checking always happened and consisted of a bit more than a quick look over the calcs. With a small team, that often meant paying outside civil engineering consultants to check our work. 

In 1997, a close friend and former colleague from Arup, Nick Hirschman, returned from Cape Town and I offered him a couple of weeks work. However, it panned out rather differently!  Nick stayed, became a director, and remains today an integral part of the Link Engineering team.  Perry Millward followed as a third director a couple of years later and brought with him a lot of design and build experience working for contractors with particular strengths in health and education, until his retirement in 2021.  Simon Curtis, another former Arup colleague, joined the team as a director in 2020, again bringing with him a wealth of experience and contacts including, amongst other things, high rise residential work.

Developing as a collective

Between us, we have developed a strong reputation as building structural engineers in a wide range of sectors.  Economic times change and the sort of work we have done has changed with it.  Manufacturing buildings demand a specialist skill set which were, for a while, our ‘bread and butter’. But, over time, demand dropped as manufacturing migrated offshore, so it’s good to see it coming back into our workload again. 

We have often had a steady, continuous workload building new or extending existing schools, colleges, health centres, and hospitals.  Leisure clients, including Showcase Cinemas and Goals Soccer, have used us to develop and reconfigure sites all over the UK.  Similarly, we have discovered that we seem to have more experience of repairing aging twentieth century buildings and car parks than most of our competitors, and that has become something of a niche market. 

New out of town shopping centres and supermarkets are becoming rare as a consequence of the growth of online retail.    However, perhaps the advent of distribution and logistics structural engineering projects, which are now an important part of our market, has come about as the other side of that same coin.

We often had a need for external civil engineering input on our building projects which exceeded our in-house capacity, which usually included car parks, service yards, roads, and drains.  We adopted the same rigorous approach to quality of those elements by working with outside resources. 

Working with Link Engineering

We came to work closely with the founders of Link Engineering and continued to do so as Link grew – there are a lot of good synergies between the approach and delivery of engineering consulting services for development projects.  It also became apparent to us that the feasibility of many building projects, especially in logistics, is led by civil engineering and transport considerations.  Clients are then inclined to want to use the same team throughout a project and don’t want different entities for building structures and civil engineering. 

We have worked hard this year to manage the name change from MBCE to Link Engineering and to bring our clients with us.  We think we have succeeded, and after 30 years we are looking forward to Link Engineering being the first name our customers consider when they want efficient structural engineering solutions for many years to come.

(The baby is also thirty now and, unlike her little sister, has stayed firmly away from Engineering)

We’re pleased to share that Nick Moore, Director here at Link Engineering UK, won Businessman of the Year at the 2022 Birmingham Awards.

The awards ceremony, which took place in November 2022, saw 23 accolades handed out to businesses and individuals recognised as champions of innovation, development, education, and more. Among the winners were historian Professor Carl Chinn, councillor Ian Ward, and the Birmingham Crisis Centre.

Nick’s hard work and personality gave him the edge for this award

Nick was shortlisted and chosen for the Businessman of the Year award thanks to his leadership on and support with engineering projects across the UK. As a Chartered Civil Engineer specialising in highway and drainage infrastructure, Nick often leads a number of our key projects.

His adaptability and entrepreneurialism for various engineering projects across different sectors particularly caught the eye of the judges.

He was also chosen for his tangible focus on profitability and growth for Link Engineering, attention to the personal development of both himself and his staff, and his support for the local community.

About Link Engineering

Link Engineering is a cost effective, civil and structural engineering consultancy which assists clients at every stage in a project life cycle. From planning to detailed design, drainage to building investigation, we will help ensure clients achieve results on their development projects.

Want to talk through your project with us and find out more about what we can do? Get in touch: call 0121 716 0100 for our Birmingham office or email mail@linkeng.co.uk today.

In September we took a well-earned trip to Alton Towers.

After working through a busy summer, it seemed only fair that we took the day to visit a theme park and let off a little steam using the social budget we allocate on a monthly basis.

A cohesive team is a large contributor to Link’s success, and this gave us the perfect opportunity to have fun and get to know the newer members of the team.

The Rollercoaster Restaurant was a great place to relax and chat over lunch and the most popular ride was the Wickerman.