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Building projects in rural areas- where do the tradesmen sleep?

63 replies

Meadowbreeze · 12/11/2022 20:20

Excuse my ignorance. Have never lived outside a huge city and this thought is really annoying me. I've been watching grand designs and I've just had this thought, where do all the workers on these random, middle of nowhere locations stay? They can't all be local. The local town or village will only have so many tradesmen all available at once, with the knowhow of building this strange design.
I guess the same goes for drastic building work in small towns and villages. Do you contact a local architect and they source all the manpower?
Do they all sleep in local hotels? Caravans? How does it work?
Or am I just being blind to the obvious surplus of tradesmen in rural areas.

OP posts:
Meadowbreeze · 13/11/2022 11:52

@CourtneeLuv sorry operatives to me just sounds like a machinery operative. Train driver at a stretch. I would never in a million years think you're talking about tradies.

OP posts:
BringOnAutumn · 13/11/2022 12:16

CourtneeLuv · 13/11/2022 09:34

"Have you contacted all the operatives to get their labour returns"

"Tell all the operatives that the inductions are only on Mondays at 8am"

"The canteen is open to all operatives between 6am and 6pm"

Dehumanising

BringOnAutumn · 13/11/2022 12:17

^dehupersonising. See how silly it all is?

CourtneeLuv · 13/11/2022 13:15

When you've got thousands of bodies on site you can't call them all by name 🙄

Svalberg · 13/11/2022 13:24

I generally know them as the trades, if not sparks, groundworkers, builders (covers construction above ground!) or mech services. They usually have breakfast on site at about 10 after doing a couple of hours work, if it's a large enough job with a canteen, which is why you don't see them at a Premier Inn breakfast. I've seen many women in PPE on site as well as those who are in site office wear, and a few female team leaders who will have come up through the ranks.

And rail PPE is orange (known as Oranges rather than PPE 😁), so that Lego figure is pretty accurate!

BringOnAutumn · 13/11/2022 13:58

CourtneeLuv · 13/11/2022 13:15

When you've got thousands of bodies on site you can't call them all by name 🙄

'Tradesmen' works perfectly 👍

Flapjackquack · 13/11/2022 14:22

Svalberg · 13/11/2022 13:24

I generally know them as the trades, if not sparks, groundworkers, builders (covers construction above ground!) or mech services. They usually have breakfast on site at about 10 after doing a couple of hours work, if it's a large enough job with a canteen, which is why you don't see them at a Premier Inn breakfast. I've seen many women in PPE on site as well as those who are in site office wear, and a few female team leaders who will have come up through the ranks.

And rail PPE is orange (known as Oranges rather than PPE 😁), so that Lego figure is pretty accurate!

Ah this explains something that I’ve been wondering. My office is high up and they are building a huge multi-tower block development next to it. Everyday I watch the people file out of a large temporary building across a purpose built walkway and start work, everyday around 10 they all file back into the building. Wondered what they were doing.

Vigneau · 13/11/2022 15:13

Meadowbreeze · 13/11/2022 11:13

@Trumpton this is exactly how I imagined rural tradies working lol as lovely as it is, I now know it's not common.

@Vigneau that's incredible!

I lived in a house next to perimeter 20 years ago. There are not many houses there (hope I am not outing myself). I can say for sure the image is a stock photo and is not the actual housing at Hinkley Point in Somerset. The modular accommodation is almost identical though the stock photo has a better finish. That is because the stock photo is student accommodation and could be any university city or town. You can clearly see suburbs and a flat landscape, so Peterborough or Cambridge would be a good shout. If you go on Google Earth and drop the human icon down onto the main road in to Hinkley Point, next to the housing campus, you will see a street view image from earlier this year. The accommodation blocks are more rustic and seem to be made of more recyclable there. Who knows, when it's job is done it may be dismantled and rebuilt somewhere else.

The extension site at Hinkley Point is 420 acres compared to the original site of 100 acres. A local farmer land-owner sold about half of the extension site for Hinkley Point and got a bit under £50m I read somewhere which is £200,000 an acre compared to local dairy land at £10,000 an acre.

One of the most amazing projects that I can recall, though I was a child at the time, was the expansion of the Upper Heyford air base between Oxford and Banbury. The expansion must have been in the late 60's when the French government wanted the US to relocate bases out of their country. As a child then, I remember sitting in my father's car on school holidays as he went about his work. Then, Upper Heyford was a mini city serving the US air force and other servicemen. We used to get there early and next to the contractors' park was a light industrial unit which took daily deliveries of food. By 9am, guys were wheeling out on foot 'market barrows' selling watermelon, bananas and milkshakes which they made up at the end of runways and hangers. In Winter months my father would often get a call out for an electrical fault, so with him being a single parent and no relatives still alive, my brother, sister and I would have to get dressed in coats and boots take pillows in the back and would drive 40 miles to the base so he could fix a fault on a hanger door. It was unreal, but those were odd times.

From what was then the A423, the road running a couple of miles to the West of the base, you could see the lights twinkling in the distance. Red lights were comms towers, white lights buildings and car parks. Then, if your timing was right on that road, you saw the most remarkable display of lights I have never witnessed again. Enormous upside down V shapes of lights embedded in the main runway which flickered on when a US fighter jet or reconnaissance plan was landing. So you saw a '^' switch on in white or green, then another and another as the whole runway literally lit up in an enormous series of arrows indicating where the pilot was to land. They would gradually light up then when fully lit, switch off for 2 seconds, then fire up again. Essential in a foggy, wet island jutting into the Atlantic compared to an air base in Nevada.

One afternoon I remember my father talking to an airman by the hangers. They were flying on that afternoon's sortie over the Netherlands, to Germany then up to the Baltic, over Norway and round Iceland back down the Irish Sea to land again in Oxfordshire. Two F111 fighters. They always went in pairs at intervals. Out at 4pm but back by supper. Europe was smaller then, it is twice the distance now to get to the Polish or Romanian border.

Sorry to have rambled. My point, if I have one, is there are some colossal projects going on and it is right to marvel at how it all is organised. The D Day landings were the biggest human 'event' ever, but the organisation of that is for another thread.

Vigneau · 13/11/2022 15:18

madroid · 13/11/2022 11:30

Do all the Hinckley Point accommodation occupiers look like this? 😁

Not too far off actually! Though when in the local pub in the evening they tend to dress down a bit and remove their helmets.

But I have never seen them with their tongue hanging out while enthusiastically showing what looks to be a variety box of dildos to the local drinkers.

MarbleParched · 13/11/2022 17:40

I live rurally and a small development of executive houses is being built nearby, the biggest house went up first and from what I can tell all the ‘operatives’ 😂 are living in that big house while the rest are constructed (about another 10)

I’ve no idea where they stayed when the first house was being built 😂

MargaretThursday · 13/11/2022 18:14

Like this!

Building projects in rural areas- where do the tradesmen sleep?
Meadowbreeze · 14/11/2022 15:01

@MarbleParched I wonder if you get a discount for buying the lived in house lol

OP posts:
TwinkleChristmas · 14/11/2022 15:02

A load of tradesman are renting out a friends Airbnb at the moment. They paid for 5 months as it’s a long term project.

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