I had a fascinating visit to the Battersea Power Station site on Friday to catch up with Lawrence Waterman who has been recruited from the Olympic Delivery Authority to oversee health and safety on this gargantuan project.
Development work on the first phase of the £8bn development got underway last July and will, in Lawrence’s words, “incorporate one of the largest and most visionary housing projects in London”, including spectacular penthouse apartments with stunning river and power station views.
The second phase covers the power station itself and will be a much more complicated process as a huge amount of restoration work needs to be done on the iconic building’s physical structure before the developers turn to the next stage of this phase — transforming the power station into a location for living, working, shopping and leisure.
Interestingly, Lawrence told me that working on such an iconic building wasn’t what excited him most. Rather it was the executive team’s aspiration to go ‘beyond expectations’ and strive to achieve the very best in all elements of the development, including health and safety.
“It was because of this ambition of the team at the highest level to be brilliant at looking at health, safety and the welfare of the workforce and looking after the interests of our neighbours in the local community,” he told me.
“It seemed to me that this was exactly what we meant when we were talking about a legacy from London 2012.”
Battersea Power Station’s website, which I strongly urge readers to visit, offers a wealth of information on the project’s timetable. I’ll be looking at the development in much more detail in a special feature in the March issue.
In this episode of the Safety & Health Podcast, ‘Burnout, stress and being human’, Heather Beach is joined by Stacy Thomson to discuss burnout, perfectionism and how to deal with burnout as an individual, as management and as an organisation.
We provide an insight on how to tackle burnout and why mental health is such a taboo subject, particularly in the workplace.
