Harold Waterman, 82, an engineering mastermind behind transformation of Britain’s urban centres in the 1960s
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article5033109.ece
Harold Waterman: structural engineer
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Hay's Galleria provided a cathedral-like atrium space that then became
fashionable
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Harold Waterman
Harold Waterman was one of the engineering masterminds behind the
transformation of Britain’s urban centres in the 1960s with a new
generation of tall buildings in reinforced concrete.
His firm, Harold Waterman & Partners, which started life on his kitchen
table in Richmond upon Thames in 1952, rode the wave of the postwar
commercial property building boom and grew into one of Britain’s biggest
engineering consultancies, employing more than 2,000 people in 15
countries. Its civil and structural engineering has given us some of
Britain’s best-known buildings, including its tallest — No 1 Canada
Square in Canary Wharf, East London.
Waterman was instrumental in the proliferation of a new architectural
vocabulary of reinforced concrete that emerged in postwar Britain. His
cost-effective, no-nonsense approach to engineering these structures
helped to break up prevailing conservative building practices and render
large-scale development more affordable.
Waterman was later a leading figure in the introduction of
American-style, rapid construction techniques to Britain in the early
1980s that doubled the speed of building and made larger-scale
commercial development, such as the Broadgate complex next to Liverpool
Street Station, Canary Wharf and the vast Bluewater shopping centre in
Kent, economically viable.
A gregarious man, Waterman thrived on networking with powerful property
developers of the day, often on the golf course or at cocktail parties
where he would instruct his staff not to come back to the office without
a lead for a new contract.
Behind the networking and business nous was a gifted mathematician who
worked out all his calculations on paper. A stickler for engineering
detail, he was often the collaborator of choice for the architect
Richard Seifert (obituary, October 27, 2001) whose concrete towers, such
as Centre Point, came to define 1960s London.
Waterman was the second of five children born into a Jewish family in
Liverpool in 1925. His father ran a DIY shop and his mother was a
schoolteacher. The young Harold was a bright child who was the first in
his family to go to university.
Having read a first-class honours degree in civil engineering at
Liverpool University, and after a brief spell with the M. W. Kellogg
engineering company, Waterman moved to London and set up H. L. Waterman
& Partners in Richmond in 1952.
Materials were still in short supply because of postwar austerity and
commercial development was strictly regulated under a system of building
licensing. Structural engineers had to use their ingenuity to make use
of whatever materials could be found. On one of Waterman’s first
projects, a series of radio and television shops in Leyton, East London,
he used welded girders made up from wartime Anderson shelters. After the
Conservative Government’s abolition of building licences in 1958, a
building boom in offices and shopping centres ensued and Waterman was
the structural engineer behind many of the controversial concrete
edifices admired by many as the symbol of a progressive age and loathed
by others as ugly and unsustainable.
Office projects for this new age engineered by Waterman included the
Barclaycard office in Northampton and a ten-storey office block in
Brixton, South London, which was one of the first projects in the
capital to use large-diameter concrete foundation piles driven into the
London clay sub-surface.
Shopping centre development boomed from 1964 onwards and Waterman
engineered retail centres at Belle Vale in Liverpool and Moss Side in
Manchester as well as in Plymouth and Middlesbrough.
He also worked on projects in rapidly expanding cities such as
Southampton and Portsmouth and in towns including Basingstoke, Slough
and Reading.
One of his most notable schemes during this time was Hearts of Oak House
(now 160 Euston Road) which was completed in 1970 — one of only three
“hung” structures in Britain at the time in which a lightweight curtain
wall was hung from a steel umbrella at the top of the building as
opposed to using load-bearing masonry walls.
This was followed by office towers such as Rolls-Royce House and Windsor
House in Victoria Street, Central London, which did much to enhance
Waterman’s reputation among the big developers working in the capital
and enabled his firm to compete with long-established engineering
consultancies such as Ove Arup.
By the 1970s the frenzy of building projects was slowing and, sensing a
downturn, Waterman diversified the business by opening an office in
Paris in 1973 aimed at capturing refurbishment work on old buildings. In
1975 the company set up an office in Nigeria, newly enriched by oil
revenues and developing fast. Meanwhile, as recession ravaged the
commercial property industry from 1974, Waterman turned his mind to
developing cheaper construction techniques that would make large-scale
development viable in more straitened times.
Cutlers Court, a five-storey office block in Houndsditch in the City
completed in 1983, was the first of a new wave of projects using
fast-track construction techniques already being used on American
skyscrapers.
The building comprised a 300-tonne steel frame, including floor slabs,
that would be speedily bolted together like a huge Meccano set. The
frame was clad in lightweight concrete elements that were prefabricated
and then assembled on site. The process halved the average time that
buildings took to build and radically reduced the cost of building
because it precluded the need for the costly formwork and intensive
labour involved in pouring concrete on site.
Waterman’s competitors had also been working on a fast-track solution
but he was the first to gain planning permission for such a building and
then helped the Government to redraft the building regulations.
“The key was being able to prove that the new technique was
fire-resistant. Cutlers Court was the prototype but it has become the
industry standard,” said Bob Campbell, Waterman’s former managing director.
Later in the property boom of the 1980s, Waterman worked on innovative
schemes such as the refurbishment of Victorian warehouses near London
Bridge. Hay’s Galleria was conceived as a huge, Victorian-style, glass
and steel-framed vaulted roof spannng waterside warehouses on either
side. It provided the kind of cathedral-like atrium space that would
become increasingly popular.
Meanwhile, Waterman presciently established an office in the London
Docklands in 1979 after a commission to design an Asda supermarket in
the Isle of Dogs. Two years later the London Docklands Development
Corporation was formed to regenerate the derelict docks and Waterman was
in the perfect position to steal a march on his rivals and benefit from
the meteoric building boom that would follow.
Renowned as a tough taskmaster with a hands-on approach, Waterman put
the fear of God into many a junior engineer but he also nurtured them by
giving them responsibility early in their careers. Colleagues lauded his
skill at putting teams in place for the long term, facilitating rapid
growth such as after the deregulation or Big Bang in the City of London
led to a boom of building projects in the Square Mile to cater for the
rapid expansion of financial services.
Such foresight was rewarded in 1988 when the company underwent a
successful flotation on the stock market, giving the Waterman Group the
means to make acquisitions and diversify into other engineering
disciplines such as transport, environmental and waste management.
It also gave the company the financial muscle to become one of Britain’s
most successful engineering consultancies overseas and assuage the
impact on it of another UK property crash in the early 1990s. Waterman
retired in 1988 but he was delighted to see the first international
office open in Moscow in 1991 followed by offices all over Eastern
Europe. Offices in China and Dubai have worked on a new generation of
taller and more outlandish skyscrapers that have pushed the boundaries
of structural engineering.
Waterman’s wife, Beryl, predeceased him and he is survived by his
daughter and son.
Harold Waterman, structural engineer, was born on November 11, 1925. He
died on October 11, 2008, aged 82
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