About

Forty years of other people’s machinery

1. 1

   Sutton Manor Colliery

   A four-year electrical apprenticeship underground, then five years practising it. Mining teaches you early that a procedure exists because something went wrong once, and that the person who skips it is not the only one who pays.

2. 2

   Ford — Dagenham and Basildon

   Ten years in volume automotive. Plant that runs continuously, maintained to a schedule rather than to a fault, where the cost of getting it wrong is measured in minutes of stopped line.

3. 3

   Rolls-Royce, Filton

   Fourteen months as a cell leader. Aerospace standards are a different order again — everything traceable, everything signed for, nothing taken on trust.

4. 4

   Honda, Swindon

   Seven years as head of engineering. Responsible for the plant, the people maintaining it, and the paperwork proving both were sound.

5. 5

   Bureau Veritas

   Fifteen years as key account director, running compliance delivery for clients spending over a million a year on it. The work was making certain that inspection actually happened, on time, to standard, across estates too large for anyone to hold in their head.

6. 6

   Ashdale Engineering

   Four years back in the field as an inspector — lifting equipment under LOLER, pressure systems under PSSR, local exhaust ventilation. The last six months as technical lead for escalators and moving walkways, which included the installations at 8 Canada Square.

Then an allotment

Retirement, a plot, and the discovery that a domestic strimmer is no match for two seasons of bramble. So I bought a professional brush cutter — a proper one, battery, blade and line head — and cleared the lot in seventy-five minutes.

Which left a machine sitting in a shed with a great deal of capacity to spare, and a plot that only needs doing twice a year. Hence the service: I bring the cutter, I do the part your strimmer will not, and you clear up at your own pace.

And then the database

Here is where forty years of compliance shows itself. Before cutting anything on someone else’s land, the first question is what is protected. A tree under a preservation order is a criminal offence to damage. A conservation area requires six weeks’ written notice to the council before most tree work at all. Designated habitat, nesting birds, ground-nesting wildlife — all of it matters, and none of it is visible from the gate.

None of that was difficult to look up, but it was tedious enough that most people would not bother. So I built something that does it in a couple of seconds.

The Greenviews site check holds published records for the whole of England — protected trees, tree preservation zones, conservation areas, designated habitat, flood warning zones. It refreshes on a schedule, it says plainly when a source is stale or has not answered, and it tells you what a local authority does not publish rather than pretending an absence is a clean sheet.

It is free to use and you do not have to be hiring me to use it. If you want to build on it, there is an API.