Dennis Wilson: CMYA’s star of the show

Dennis Wilson’s flexible, immersive approach enabled Lend Lease to carry out a major renovation of the National Theatre while the actors continued to perform – and won him the title of Construction Manager of the Year. Elaine Knutt reports.

When construction manager of the Year Dennis Wilson MCIOB goes walkabout at his former project, there’s a sense of a much-loved actor returning to a favourite stage. Escorting Construction Manager around the revitalised National Theatre, the Lend Lease operations director is greeted warmly by Johann the restaurant manager, Duncan the front of house manager, and Gordon the doorman. Considering Wilson was responsible for delivering a project that disrupted the lives of National Theatre staff for two and a half years, it’s a remarkably warm homecoming.

But Wilson appears to have made the personal and cultural shift from construction world to arts world, adapting working methods to the theatre’s culture and becoming a valued part of its unique community. With his straight-down-the-line open communication and calm responses to complex problems, his guidance of a “once in a lifetime” project gave the world-class team at the NT the reassurance that they were in the hands of an equally capable professional.

In fact, his initiation to the theatre’s world began shortly after the project started, with a conversation with the National Theatre’s executive director Lisa Burger, later to back his nomination for the CMYA award. She advised him to see a show, picking first world war drama War Horse, in order to fully understand the workings and ethos of the NT. As Wilson recalls: “I took the whole family to see it and it was just amazing. I said to Lisa, ‘I get it’.”

In Wilson’s award citation, Burger described him as “a pillar of strength”, while the judging panel noted that he had pulled off a challenging project while in the public eye and without affecting a single performance. Wilson beat 69 other finalists to the trophy: the stories of 19 medallists are featured on the following pages.

The National Theatre’s £48m NT Future project, delivered by Wilson’s team of 12 and a total of 2,500 operatives, was a low-key transformation that has nevertheless equipped the institution for the coming decades. Working to sensitive designs by architect Haworth Tompkins, the project delivered new facilities, workshops and performance space to carefully complement Sir Denys Lasdun’s Grade II*-listed 39-year-old masterpiece. In fact, the new front-of-house areas, first-floor restaurant and undercroft “Understudy” bar, although considerably altered from the original, feel reassuringly authentic.

Lend Lease secured the project – with Wilson forming part of the bid team – in autumn 2012, establishing an onsite presence in December 2012. But it was six months before work actually started, with Wilson and his team investing considerable time upfront in formulating the right programme that would address the theatre community’s needs.

“When we first started, I walked around the site and had preconceived ideas about how to approach it,” he explains. “For three to four weeks after we were appointed, we tried to apply normal construction logic, but then when we had spoken to people here we really had to rethink how to do it. So we spent the next three months having a real engagement period with the National Theatre, talking to all the departments and the individuals.”

As an example of what you might call the “method acting” school of construction management, Wilson placed his services manager Cary Wood in the theatre’s maintenance team for six months, before creating the project methodology. “It was invaluable. Cary was able to develop a very detailed M&E services schedule to enable us to carry out all the isolations and various M&E intervention works to allow us to keep the National Theatre running while we cut and carved the building.”

Phase A centred on the new Dorfman theatre, a rebuild of the former studio-style Cottesloe theatre that involved expanding seating numbers and installing a new hydraulic stage, as well as new air-conditioning and cooling system. This phase also included back-of-house areas and workshops, converting former store rooms to office space and creating new digital suites — to allow new producers to develop work using the resources of the National theatre. There was also the addition of new catering facilities, with theatregoers’ sandwiches and interval snacks now being prepared in a new basement kitchen in the former car park.

The Sackler Pavilion (Philip Vile)

This was followed by Phase B, which concentrated on the front of house areas seen by visitors and theatregoers: the new foyer and entrance layout, restaurants, bars and public realm, and also the new planting on the riverside terraces. Within these two broad phases, smaller sub-phases were sectionally completed and handed over progressively.

Throughout, Wilson took considerable care to head off any cultural clashes between the NT’s creatively driven staff and construction managers with a get-the-job-done mentality. Liaison with client representatives took the form of monthly meetings with the heads of department, or HODs, when Wilson’s team would outline the plans for the next six months and make sure there were early warning signals of any “issues”.

But the key group to influence, Wilson recognised, were the trade contractors’ site supervisors. “They all went on a backstage tour so they would understand how the theatre worked, so they’d automatically understand the constraints — like the hours the prop department worked, or the carpentry department, or all the other various departments,” he recalls.

A fundamental rule communicated to all operatives and staff was that they should behave as if they were “a guest in someone’s house”. But, happily, the hosts also reciprocated with the personal touch. “The National Theatre wanted to make it as pleasant as possible for staff, so the construction team was served the same food given to the actors, staff and members of the public.”

Phase A included the expansion of the stage and seating area

In addition, he and Burger devised a health and safety incentive scheme so that as many team members as possible could see NT shows. “We had some fantastic thank-yous from people who’d never been to the theatre before,” he says.

The result was a bilateral commitment that saw the project through testing times, with the project straddling the NT’s 50th birthday celebrations and a visit from the Queen. “I can’t stress enough how fantastic the team were: they were very dedicated. Because the National Theatre didn’t want anything to disrupt the shows and audience experience, the team would respond 24/7. None of this could have been achieved without them.”

Wilson says one example came when the NT was doing an external broadcast and the TV crew couldn’t transmit because the jib of the crane was in the line of transmission – the crane operator had to come out on a Saturday evening.

Overall, the programme must have had the strategic complexity of a chessboard, coordinating a night-works programme that involved 300 operatives on site every night from 11pm to 7am for 18 months, across as many as 30 or 40 different workfaces due to the two phases overlapping. “If you had to walk the job it would take three to four hours to get round all the little packets of work,” Wilson recalls.

He also had to contend with a less fortunate legacy of 1960s construction: 70 tonnes of asbestos. Exposed structural steel beams in the backstage areas had been covered in “limpet spray” asbestos as a fire-retardant measure, which needed to be removed in controlled conditions with special pellets and high pressure water spray. Similarly, asbestos rope was found in the 1960s rooflights.

Phase B concentrated on the new foyer and entrance area (Philip Vile)

The National Theatre project marked a stage in the upward progression of Wilson’s 18-year career at Lend Lease, joining Bovis Lend Lease in 1997 as a building services manager. Other notable projects included Morgan Stanley at Canary Wharf, the BBC project at Broadcasting House and new Rothschild HQ in the City, where he became a CMYA finalist in 2012. Although Wilson didn’t win a medal, the achievement led to him putting himself forward for MCIOB membership.

Wilson, who was born in London with Jamaican parents, left school at 16 to take O-Levels at college and later embarked on an apprenticeship as an electrician, following his dad’s advice to “get a trade”.

Although he says his teenage self looked no further ahead than completing the apprenticeship, he is now helping other young people to map out long-term careers by managing just under 100 day-release and graduate trainees working in the Lend Lease construction business.

CMYA category and overall winners become of interest to rival businesses and recruitment consultants, with tales of LinkedIn invitations flooding in-boxes and a furtive trade in winners’ mobile numbers. But a career move doesn’t appear to be on the cards. “The beauty of Lend Lease is that we have our own development department, construction department and investments throughout the world, so any opportunities within the Lend Lease business has lots of challenges,” he says.