Technology eased the transition to home-working, but my concern for the wider construction industry is growing, says Niall Maxwell of Rural Office for Architecture

Buildings.

So, we find ourselves back where we started when we set up in practice 12 years ago; working from home on the farm, the children a little older, the buildings and landscape more established, but with more work and the support of a growing team. The only shift in emphasis is that we now have this team spread across Dyfed working from small cottages and farmsteads in remote villages and market towns.

Of course, 12 years ago, this wouldn’t have been feasible. The internet changed everything, making it possible for us to communicate from a distant land to whoever and wherever we needed. Rural broadband was an ongoing headache for small businesses like ours, but in the last couple of years things have been transformed to allow us all to be communicating at will whether through cable, satellite or digital.

My initial optimism from our first week in isolation is leading to perhaps a sense of reality about the more macro picture”

Our studio environment is quite intimate, all working from one space sharing and listening to conversations about projects in progress, so I did initially worry that this would be a difficult thing to convert to an online format. Fortunately, people younger than me have implemented the use of software which allows us to talk more freely throughout the working day without clogging up the email or reverting to the phone. However, this has had the adverse effect of making me feel like an air traffic controller monitoring the progress of 20 live jobs at one time. We have a group chat each morning, run through where we’re at, and then use the message board for the remainder of the day to communicate.

We have enough work in hand to keep going for now, but we are of course reliant on everything else being as it should, and it’s evident that industry doesn’t see it that way. Some sites are now closed for the foreseeable future, others limp on but without the supply chain efficiencies they need. Some projects are reliant on planning dialogue or approval, others need technical support from industry and specialists. My initial optimism from our first week in isolation is leading to perhaps a sense of reality about the more macro picture, the one we can’t influence or change, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see a scaling back of ambition in the coming weeks before accepting that a genuine hiatus will affect the whole profession for a short period.

Rural areas are always the last to see the benefits of an economic upturn, but the first to see the downturn”

My bigger concern is the longer-term forecast, which makes me reflect on the last recession and the impact it had on rural areas; we are always the last to see the benefits of an economic upturn, but the first to see the downturn. Industry contracted and supply chain economics led to shortages of materials reaching these parts, higher prices for basic products and a lowering of consumer confidence to invest in even the smallest of projects.  Back then for me it wasn’t a problem, I could step back for a while and garden or chop firewood, but now with employees and dependents one thinks differently about what’s important and how to provide.

So, from my kitchen table I reflect on this as I look out over the valley, from an incomplete self-build (12 years and counting), and instead develop strategies for coping with the short, medium and long term in a world full of genuine uncertainty and risk. I’m thinking 2021 already, seeing this year as only about survival and consolidation.  However, when I compare myself to so many others working in different sectors and with differing responsibilities, I realise we personally have nothing to complain about.