Valentin Ivanov to Associate

Gavin Sealey to Associate

Ferdi Jafar to Associate

Punam Bramhankar to Principal Engineer

William Talbot to Engineer

Megha Bhat to Assistant Engineer

Tom and Val visit NMITE college to give an insight to students about working within the civil engineering sector.

Link was privileged to have the opportunity for two team members, Valentin Ivanov and Tom Price, to speak with first-year students at NMITE in Hereford about Link Engineering’s work, including our efforts to enhance the Leominster public realm, where we have been working alongside McBains, Herefordshire county council and Leominster town council to bring the project forward, with works on site currently underway!

NMITE is a college which supports young adults in becoming specialised engineers and achieving degree-level qualifications. During our visit, we provided an overview of the roles at Link and the everyday operations of an engineering consultancy. After the talk, Val and Tom led a group discussion during which they gave the students insights and recommendations on how to build competencies specific to the civil engineering sector. The session also involved students separating into smaller groups and developing mood boards for a project they were working on locally.

Link is dedicated to promoting growth in communities. We enjoy assisting organisations like NMITE, as part of our social value efforts, and hope to continue to build on our support for future generations of engineers.

“We had an incredible time together last Friday when we visited NMITE in Hereford. We took pleasure in providing information about Link Engineering’s activities, especially its project to improve Leominster’s public realm.” – Tom Price

“It was inspiring to spend time with the first-year students and witness their enthusiasm for creating local projects. Being able to support the next generation of engineers is always a pleasure.”- Valentin Ivanov

Our Senior Technician, Jason Gibbons, has achieved an important career milestone by becoming BIM Certified.

Jason has already started to work on implementing BIM methods and procedures on a number of projects.

BIM is set up to encourage the process of collaborative working and managing all aspects and information associated on a project through the entire life cycle; all to a national standard (ISO 19650). With Jason now being qualified, he will oversee the process of ensuring Link’s operations are as efficient and effective as possible.

Jason Gibbons, Senior Technician – “I am happy to have achieved my ISO 19650 Information Management Certification. I’m excited to see how this develops and can be implemented on Link projects going forward. Thank you to everyone at Link for your support.”

Chris Hadjivassiliou, Associate, – “I’m really pleased to see Jason’s and the team’s commitment to utilising the latest technology and recognised processes. I am keen to see how the introduction of more advanced and structured BIM procedures can help our design delivery, the schemes we work on and ultimately our clients.”

The Link Engineering team set out to The Belfry Hotel and Resort recently for a site meeting and tour.

The trip was part of Link’s ongoing work for VINCI to design a new ballroom and accommodation block opposite the eighteenth hole of the Belfry’s world class Brabazon golf course.

Inviting the whole team onsite was important because the work, which started in Summer 2023, has involved many team members across several disciplines and grades. Being local to our Birmingham office, it provided the perfect opportunity to see Link’s design work being brought to life on site.

For some team members, it was their first visit on to an operational building site.

Rachael Chambers, Office Manager: “I am grateful to Link for giving me the chance visit a site in person. The trip gave me a deeper understanding of the work our engineers do and how the work I do supports this.”

Another important aspect of the visit was to hear from VINCI about how Link can best add value and meet their evolving needs. As part of a group discussion with VINCI senior management, it was great to hear how the Link engineers have been able to meet deadlines and coordinate information within a large project team.

Nick Hirschman, Director: “We’re incredibly proud of the work the Link team has delivered on this project, in which there have been multiple considerations to factor in. It was great to get everyone out on site to meet our client and experience the buildings taking shape.”

With four Ryder Cups held by the Belfry, more than any other sporting venue, it has a historic past. It also won the World Golf Awards’ 2019 World’s Best Golf Hotel award, and later in the summer, the British Masters is expected to be held there. We’ll share more information about this project, adding to the enduring legacy of The Belfry, as it develops.

Link has expanded significantly since its beginnings in 2019. We now have a team of thirty, and we operate out of two offices: one in Birmingham and the other, which we have recently moved into, in the centre of Manchester.

Birmingham is award winning! 🏆

We are thrilled to announce that Reach Business Coaching recently awarded Rob Gill, Nick Moore, and Jess Moore with the Work Environment Award 2024 for its Birmingham office!

The award was given in recognition of Link’s commitment to creating a working environment that supports the wellbeing and productivity of the team. Before the team moved into the office in May 2023, Link’s leadership team co-designed an office space which reflected it’s brand and working approach. The result was a bright and fresh environment fit for a growing team.

Link is more than simply a place of employment; it’s a team where everyone works together to continually improve our technical delivery and have fun along the way! We are grateful to our brilliant team for making Link a great place to work.

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)