Look around any commercial, or industrial building site and you’ll see why everyone needs a good steel erectors insurance policy.
And without good steel erectors insurance, building work will dramatically grind to a halt.
But to the uninitiated, just what are steel erectors?
The best way to understand what they do is look at commercial and industry buildings (warehouses, factories, car sales showrooms and large offices are good examples) and see how they are constructed. Nowadays it’s all about modular construction techniques and keeping costs down. So the more you can almost ‘automate’ the process and use materials which are standardised, and can be built in a standard way, the more costs can be reduced.
If materials and labour are two of the biggest costs with a new building, then architects have to design buildings which don’t exhaust the available budget. Thus, nowadays, you tend to get buildings which are ‘standard’ to a point that some would call boring.
Take a look at any modern out of town shopping centre, or industrial park, in any part of the UK, and you will immediately see that they all look the same. They lack the ‘romance’ and creativity of many of the buildings which were erected before the second world war. Indeed, the most splendid period in industrial architecture was when the Victorians pulled out all the stops to create architectural edifices which showed the rest of the world how rich and clever they were. In the times of the British Empire, appearances were everything. And although materials were relatively expensive, labour was not. Indeed, labour costs were so low and the pool of working men available so plentiful, that the Victorians and many industrialists afterwards, could afford to give vent to their imagination.
Another great period came about in the 1930s when in America especially, the horrors of the Great Crash, when unemployment and destitution were rife, were mitigated with huge Art Deco building projects which were meant to get the country back to working again.
Now we are firmly in the ‘utilitarian’ period when the constraints of budget far outweigh any romantic leanings about how buildings should look. Once a concrete pad has been put down, steel erectors get to work, building a metal shell from which the roof and walls are supported. And nowadays only small teams are required to get the job in a short space of time, replacing the hitherto hundreds of men needed to achieve the same aims.
But the work is skilled, can be dangerous, and effects on so many other working trades, and people on site, that everyone needs the protection of good steel erectors insurance. Indeed, good working policies should be constructed just like a modern factory: economically and efficiently.
For more information visit www.titan-insurance.com
