In brief: The Deep, Carillion, Danum Well Services

STARTUP building services and engineering company Ridings Consulting Engineers has landed £30,000 of contracts and is now expanding its offices and workforce.

Six months ahead of schedule, the company moved into The Deep Business Centre and is now doubling its office space to 500 sq ft.

Ridings Consulting Engineers Ltd. was founded in May by Ian Grimwood and Liam Beardshaw.

Mr Grimwood said: “We expected things to be slow whilst we built up our client base but many of our clients, who we worked with in our previous roles, where only too happy to use us. We are now getting repeat business as well as new clients.
“Due to having an enviable start with substantial orders in our first 24 hours Liam and myself have built up the business from there. We’ve moved premises twice and we’ve recruited an electrical engineer and expect to recruit further engineering staff over the next few months.”

Freya Cross, business and Corporate Manager at The Deep, said: “Ridings Consulting Engineers were effectively a start-up business when they moved here only a few months after setting up and that is an area in which we have particular expertise.

“We have an excellent record of managing and growing businesses because we know the sort of challenges they face and we work hard to take some of the pressure off so they can concentrate on looking after their contracts and customers.”

***SOUTH YORKSHIRE company K Hartwall has sold a 292,000 sq ft site to Carillion, netting £1.1m in the process.
The Spennymoore site in County Durham was a former manufacturing facility, previously part of the Tinsley Wire Group’s UK facilities.

It was at the centre of a complex legal sale by Wake Smith Solicitors on behalf of Hartwall.

The site will now become a residential development which will complement the Spennymoor Regeneration Masterplan, the largest mixed-use regeneration scheme in the north east of England.

Neil Salter, director at Wake Smith, said: “We were appointed by the UK arm of K. Hartwall on the disposal of this property in 2012.

“We entered into a promotion agreement with the Carillion Arlington Spennymoor Trust in 2012 to maximize the planning potential and saleability of the site and then earlier this year, K Hartwall agreed a revised deal with Carillion. We were able to advise our client and achieve a further revision, whereby the whole of the price would be paid over on completion.

“There was also the provision of an overage deed to allow K Hartwall to share in any material uplift in receipts from the residential development on site. As we always do on sales of industrial land, we provided within the agreement that all environmental responsibilities potentially associated with the site’s past industrial use are passed on to the purchaser.”

Chris Sampson, from K. Hartwall, said: “We are pleased to announce the sale of a disused industrial site in the north-east of England to Carillion, which will now be used for Spennymoor’s much needed residential development.

“This deal has taken several years, as is often the nature of such a transaction, but we are delighted with the legal advice we were given by Wake Smith in the pursuit of maximising our return on the sale.”

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WELL intervention equipment supplier Danum Well Services is expanding at a new Doncaster business park.

The company, which has been established for over 20 years, is relocating its operations to Bullrush Business Park.

It has taken 6,000 sq ft of space on the park which is due to be completed later this month. Joining them are suppliers to the engineering industry Signet Industrial Distribution Limited which has concluded the agreement lease also on a 6,000 sq ft unit.

Construction work on the Bullrish project was partly funded with a £1.4m grant from the European Regional Development Fund.

Rebecca Schofield, partner at the Sheffield office of Knight Frank, joint agent alongside PPH Commercial, said: “The site represents a significant opportunity for smaller to mid-size businesses seeking quality industrial space and facilities.

“We are seeing an encouraging level of market demand in the scheme and are confident the business park will be fully occupied by local and regional businesses shortly.”

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