We sat down with Gregory Benson this week to find out what he does at Glenman.

What is your job title?

Design Coordinator

How long have you been working for Glenman?

Coming up to 5 months now.

Tell us a little bit about your professional and educational background.

I graduated back in 2020 with a Masters in Civil Engineering from the University of Surrey, throughout which I had numerous summer and year-long placements out in industry.

Following University, I worked on Access for All schemes at train stations in and around London. It was a rather niche job and it took some hard work to get up to speed with all of Network Rail’s terminologies and railway systems, but they were indeed all rewarding projects to be a part of. The shift to the building sector was something that I always envisaged though!

What is a typical day in Glenman like for you?

As Design Coordinator, most of my time is taken up with two tasks – reviewing drawings and staying on top of design progression.

Reviewing drawings is critical as spotting errors at design stage is vastly more cost-effective than realising a mistake post-build. Within the review, the approved building regulation documents must be checked against, the constructability of the proposals must be scrutinised and all disciplines must be coordinated with one another.

Monitoring design progression involves ensuring that our design consultants are producing or updating their drawings in line with our programme, and also that we are sourcing specialist designers in good time to allow sufficient time for design and manufacturing.

Tell us about an interesting project you have worked on since joining Glenman?

My first project when I joined Glenman was New City Road in Newham. It has 20 flats and 8 houses, all built to Passivhaus standards. As I’d recently joined the building sector, it was a great learning curve and allowed me to rapidly gain exposure to multi-disciplinary and specialist designs.

Tell us about your hobbies!

I do like any kind of racket sports and have played badminton for the last 20 years, but with all this good weather recently, I have mainly been out on the tennis court.

I have also just moved into a new flat, so spend most evenings planning and doing the renovation works.