Increasingly, our projects involve refurbishment and extension, rather than new builds. This is great from a sustainability perspective. However, when we’re looking at an existing building, it’s often a battle to find existing structural information.

A couple of decades ago, when an engineer finished work on a project, paper copies of the drawings would be kept in archive boxes, which would then be moved to an archive storage facility after a certain time. For our current projects, it’s a similar situation but in digital format — the digital files go from a server to a digital archive. This means the logical first step in the hunt for records is to go to the original engineer.

If we can’t identify the engineer, then the methods become unsystematic: we can sometimes find information in building basements hidden in an old filing cabinet; occasionally, building control has some information (if the building is new enough); perhaps we find something in local archives, sifting through microfiche or old photos in the London Metropolitan Archives. Even if we succeed, we often find that the hard-worn drawings are architectural and show us what we already knew or could easily discover. Resourcing hundreds of hours for research is not always feasible within a project budget and can still end up in a fruitless search.

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