Today, bringing down office blocks, bridges and motorway flyovers is about precision planning – rather than explosives and wrecking balls. The firms doing the work have to ensure the job is done quickly and cleanly, making sure staff are safe and making sure anyone living or working nearby isn’t badly affected by dust or debris.
AR Demolition, based in a little village just outside the Leicestershire county town of Market Bosworth, is a big player, having worked on some of the biggest schemes in the Midlands.
It brought down the Belgrave flyover on the outskirts of Leicester a decade ago – ahead of schedule – and demolished the British Union Shoe Machinery factory, which once stood nearby.
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The team was involved in knocking down the former TI Tubes site in Desford, now the site of the Poundstretcher headquarters, and more recently demolished old industrial buildings at Croft Quarry, a few miles east of that, in one of the few occasions when explosives were needed.
In Leicester city centre they helped strip out the eyesore International Hotel and were also brought in to clear the site of the city’s old Krystals Nightclub after fire ripped through it earlier this year.
And they demolished the five storey car-park, bus station and link bridge at the Broadmarsh shopping centre in Nottingham to make way for a huge regeneration scheme.
As well as working for private clients, the team are on Leicester City Council’s emergency call-out list, which saw them brought in to make things safe when big lumps of rubble started falling off a building in Church Gate earlier this year. They also recently on the eastern side of the city after the owner tried to do things on the cheap late last year.
And they were brought in following a 2018 explosion at a property in Hinckley Road, Leicester, where five people work killed, working alongside police and forensics crews for a month.
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For founder Richard Dolman, one of the highlights and “a real pivotal moment” was its involvement in the £500 million King’s Cross Station ticket concourse development, which opened in 2012.
Since then a new ownership structure has been brought in with Mr Dolman – who launched the business in 2007 – moving into a directorship role while Mike Henderson became managing director and Matt Munro became finance director.
Mike Henderson said the business was turning over up to £20 million in a good year and was now one of the top firms in Britain, gradually extending its reach outside the region. The number of workers on the company’s books is around 85.
Its growing reputation meant it recently won the supply chain excellence award at the 2023 Construction News Awards where it was up against the likes of HS2, Speedy Hire and J Murphy and Sons.
Mr Henderson said: “We’re a national company but focus on the Midlands and basically follow the best clients – so if they want us to work up north or in the south we’ll go there.
“We’re one of the biggest Midlands contractors and probably in the top 15 in the 海角视频 – though the top five on that list are more in the construction business, but with a demolition arm, and are London-centric.
“We will run several projects at once, varying in size. We’ve been doing one in Oxford where they are remodelling a shopping mall and more locally we’ve got a big job in Nottingham at the Bendingo sorting office [which is set to become student flats]. That’s been a really tricky one in terms of asbestos removal – but all our managers are trained to manage licensed asbestos.
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“One more local project we worked on was remodelling the former International Hotel in Rutland Street, Leicester. That’s a concrete framed building and we took the partitions out and opened up the floors to make it ready for student accommodation. That was about £1.1 million and they are now in the main building stage.
“I was born in Leicester and always kept my eye on that building which was always a bit of a monstrosity.”
Right now, he said, there’s a lot of uncertainty in construction with developers feeling nervous about investments – as a result some projects have slowed.
Mr Henderson said: “There’s a danger that we talk ourselves into further unrest and hesitation – we have some jobs that have been delayed six or eight months.”
Despite that, the business still has a busy workload. In recent years AR Demolition has worked with the likes of Aldi, Winvic, Galliford Try, Balfour Beatty and Vinci.
He said: “We want partnerships with quality clients. We also want to be versatile, doing everything from city centre to demolition work in quarries, and have invested in machinery that is much more versatile than the equipment we would have used in the past.
“Explosives get all the press, but they are only 2 per cent of our industry – though in the right instance they still work well.
“Nowadays there’s a lot of engineering that goes into what we do – not just bringing out a big wrecking ball. We go from doing small emergency work all the way up to removing bridges.
“A lot of business owners we talk to think we are too big for smaller jobs, but we want to be that local contractor that people think of first.”
Founder Richard Dolman said: “I’ve done four explosive jobs in my 25 years in the demolition industry and never seen a wrecking ball used in my life.
“There are really good careers in this business today – engineers, health and safety experts, cab operators.
“It’s a career where you can start right at the bottom if you choose and there are good wage packages available.
“It’s definitely more than just about turning up with a big digger.”