FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Going the Extra Mile

Heathrow Asphalt will dramatically increase our capacity to take on new work wherever it might appear – in West London, in the London Boroughs, or in the counties of southeast England.

have time to do. At one of these days, the previous year, we had asked ourselves the question ‘What Next?’ The answer that we came up with was this: everything we do is in the southeast – why don’t we do something in the northwest of London? So, I started thinking about that, and began looking around, and I found a piece of land not far from Heathrow Airport at a place called Bulls Bridge. The site had been bought three years before for £18 million, but the company that bought it were in trouble and needed to sell. That worked out well for us. The sale was delayed when the company went bust, and we had to re-open negotiations with the Liquidator. But we eventually bought the site for a little over £6 million. That was an amazing deal. Getting the necessary planning permissions took a while, because we had ambitious plans for the site, which we have now renamed ‘Heathrow Asphalt’. As the name suggests, we are building a new asphalt plant, which will be very similar to our award-winning plant at Erith. The Erith plant is now working at full capacity: it produces 400,000 tonnes a year. (I believe it’s the busiest asphalt plant in Europe.) We will also have a new recycling facility on the site. Heathrow Asphalt will dramatically increase our capacity to take on new work wherever it might appear – in West London, in the London Boroughs, or in the counties of southeast England. And, as with all the places we have acquired, the Heathrow Asphalt site offered all kinds of potential that needed to be explored. One of its unusual features was that it was on the Paddington Branch of the canal. Would the canal be a useful transport route for the large amounts of materials that we would need to shift? To find out, I hired a barge and we motored along the canal to Paddington. It was not as quick as I had hoped: the journey took about four hours. And this

The new Asphalt Plant and Aggregate Recycling Facility under construction.

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