Conisbee

Conisbee

Alan Conisbee & Associates was founded September 1982 in the back bedroom of Alan Conisbee’s north London flat, offering elegant and practical engineering services. Two years later, Chris Boydell joined Alan as an enthusiastic young engineer and the practice begins to grow. Soon after, the first office opens on Compton Road, Highbury Corner with six engineers.

The practice grows quickly in the mid 80’s as London started to boom. The Almeida Theatre becomes Conisbee’s first arts, and now oldest client. Tim Attwood joins as a fresh faced, recently Chartered Engineer, in 1986 bringing with him some more modern design tools including the practice’s first computer.

The first partnership was created in 1988 with Alan and Chris, a short time later Tim joined the board and the office moves to our current home in Offord Street in 1989. The practice has grown to 20 members of staff.

The early 90’s recession see’s Conisbee building up clients within the arts and hospitality sectors. Conisbee expertise in conservation also evolves with repair and refurbishment of important mid 20th century buildings.

Bob Stagg joined the practice in 1998 to take on this work and it has continued to develop ever since.

During the mid to late 90’s Conisbee begin working on an increasing number and scale of inner city housing developments.

The practice incorporated in 2000 and Bob joined Alan, Chris and Tim as a Director. The early 2000’s was a period of steady growth in 2004 Tom Beaven became a Director in 2004 and took over leading the marketing responsibilities.

The company’s energy efficiency ambitions began to formulate in 2002 when they helped establish the specialist low-carbon engineering consultancy XCo2. Since then Conisbee have continued to promote the reduction of a building’s carbon usage through choices of construction material and design including the potential uses of MMC and efficiencies of offsite construction. In 2007 Conisbee joined the Islington Sustainability Partnership back when it launched, and has continued to focus on carbon reduction and net Zero targets as a practice and across the construction industry.

Conisbee heavily promoted MMC and the practice worked with several manufactures on numerous housing and education projects. The practice won its first international project in 2007, and this becomes their first year at MIPIM. This

By 2008 the practice had 90 staff.

Conisbee opened its Norwich office in 2012 and following the success of this the Cambridge office was opened in 2014. This allowed the Civil Engineering team to grow steadily with an increasing scale and diversity of projects around housing or redevelopment sites in London and East Anglia.

As Conisbee approached the mid decade, with three of the original directors in their 60’s, a long term succession plan was implemented. In 2015 Allan Dunsmore, Paul Hartfree and Richard Dobson became Directors. Alan Conisbee stepped down in 2016 with Tim Attwood taking over as MD. Alan retired in 2017 followed by Chris Boydell in 2018 and Bob Stagg in 2020. Ben Heath became a Director in 2019 and Kevin Clark in 2021.

The Conisbee Heritage team has also seen significant growth and now work on some very well-known public buildings with Conservation Accredited Engineers (CARE) specialising in the inspection, appraisal, repair and adaptation of historic structures and sites of all types throughout the United Kingdom.

Arts work, particularly in theatres has also grown steadily and we now work for all the main London theatre owners.

However housing work continues to be the bedrock of the practice workload and has developed to suit the demands of the market. From mid rise inner-city densification, to towers, green field development sites, student housing, subterranean development and now rooftop extensions. The last few years have been tricky to navigate with the referendum, Brexit and now the pandemic knocking confidence at different times and triggering many other changes to both the industry and the wider world of work. When the pandemic began the practice acted quickly and decisively to adapt to the changed circumstances, so now in the summer 2021 is in a strong position with an increasing order book and effective systems to tackle whatever the future holds for us.

https://www.conisbee.co.uk/

design@conisbee.co.uk

+ 44 (0) 20 7700 6666