Fairground attraction

When your client tells you that it will lose £1.5m worth of business if the contract you have been working on for more than a year is not completed on time, then you know the pressure is on.

That is the position Shepherd Construction finds itself in as it enters the final stages of a 62-week contract to design and build an indoor/outdoor water park, a 216-bed Caribbean-themed hotel, 450-delegate gothic-themed conference centre and 300-seater restaurant.

But as the deadline looms, any doubt that the 16,000m2 project will not be completed on time are dismissed by construction manager Steve Hudson.

He says: "We always knew that we had 62 weeks and that the deadline was set in stone. It brought home to us how close we were to the deadline when in April we saw adverts in Sunday newspaper magazines stating that the water park at Alton Towers would be open to the public on 1 June.

"Bookings worth £1.5m have already been made for the conference facilities this summer. However, despite seeing the dates in print I never once feared the project would not be finished on time and to budget."

Shepherd is no stranger to working on theme parks; it has built them in Blackpool and Southend. The contractor is also well known to the Tussauds Group, which owns Alton Towers. It built an identical hotel on the giant Staffordshire site seven years ago.

Initially the latest contract was to build a hotel along the lines of the original one, but then one of Alton Towers' main board directors went to America, saw said water park and decided there and then that he wanted Alton Towers to be the first theme park in Europe to have one.

As a result, the project escalated from being a £12m hotel to a £49m water park and the race to win the prestigious, groundbreaking contract was on.

"The contract went to a two-stage tender and we were one of four bidding," recalls Hudson. "We won the first stage tender, despite not being the cheapest, after convincing the client that we could do the job quicker than our main competitors. Originally it was a 72-week programme, but by changing the scope for the hotel from traditional masonry to a pre-cast construction we were immediately able to reduce it by 10 weeks.

"We then trimmed another six weeks off by looking at ways we could design the steel frames through prefabrication."

The contractor's work on the original hotel in 1996 was also an important factor as far as Tussauds was concerned.

"Shepherd had zero defects on the first project, while the one or two minor problems we did have were dealt with immediately," says Hudson.

"The original project was on time and to budget. We also used our own architects and engineers on this project as part of an identical package."

However, top of the agenda was safety. The client made it clear it did not want any of the bad publicity that would be generated if anyone was killed or seriously injured working at one of Britain's most famous theme parks.

"Safety has always been the priority for us too," adds Hudson. "We have a dedicated safety manager - he has no other responsibilities apart from safety. He is in charge of making sure method statements are in place, that the operatives have read its contents and are aware of it, while he continually walks around site assessing operations."

Although there appears to be no stumbling blocks in the construction work itself, the location of Alton Towers caused three huge problems.

"The first was us being unable to get any deliveries on site," says Hudson. "With thousands of people arriving from 7am onwards in the summer to avoid the queues and get on the rides first, it was a nightmare.

"Second, the surrounding roads are so small that there is only one route we can use to get the largest steel sections into site. We had to come from Ashbourne down the A52 because it had the fewest number of bends.

"Finally, throughout the winter, all boarding houses shut down because Alton Towers was closed and there was no business.

"With 150 of my 300 staff lodging away from home we had to ring all the locals to see if any were willing to open up. In fact we actually encountered hostility from some boarding houses, with many refusing point blank to have anything to do with us because we were building another hotel and they saw that as a threat to them."

However, once Shepherd's operatives were able to set foot on site they could not fail but be impressed with the way the client just left them to it.

According to Hudson: "It has been a real team effort from start to finish. You cannot always achieve the client's aspirations from an artists' sketch, so there has been a lot of open discussion. However, Alton Towers realised that if it didn't leave us to it, and kept wanting to tweak things here and there, we would never finish the job."

Provided the completion date is secured, and as a token of its appreciation, the client has offered a free holiday to every operative on site.

"Every person who has contributed to the substantial effort made on the project will get an overnight stay in a family room with one day in the water park and access into the main theme park for a day as well," says Hudson.

With many of the workers having been on site from 7am to 11pm in two shifts, seven days a week, as the project peaks, and all leave cancelled until deadline day, no one would argue that a short holiday is the least they deserve. n