Uckfield firm ITM-Soil builds new headquarters in town

Expansion of one of Uckfield’s biggest employers is creating high-tech workspaces that would not be out of place in a laboratory.

ITM-Soil is having two new buildings constructed at the rear of its existing premises.

The company took possession of the new-build at the end of last month (May), writes Paul Watson. Our photograph was taken as work progressed.

The focus now shifts to the original building, part of which will be re-built and the remainder refurbished.

The company is investing around £1.75m in the whole project. It will provide the business with 36,000 sq ft of space – just over double the current area.

Director in charge of the operation, Chris Rasmussen, said the company had completely outgrown existing premises.

They were one of the first – probably the first – firms to move on to what we now know as the Bellbrook Business Park in 1979.

Mr Rasmussen said the original building was designed for a maximum of 40 people.

“Although not all of them are based here, 150 people work for ITM Soil with about 85 of them here. As you can imagine it is like sardines.

“We have put a couple of mezzanine floors in but we have simply run out of space. So our options were to find another site big enough for us all to be in one place, and to be fair there was nowhere in Uckfield to do that, or to develop the land behind our building,” he said.

Work has been going on since November 2009 on what previously was scrubland between the existing factory and offices and the Uckfield link road.

Mr Rasmussen said: “We manufacture instrumentation used in the construction industry. While it may get put into the ground in a fairly dirty environment, it has to be made in a clean environment.”

Static electricity has to be eliminated in the production process – static can cause small but potentially disastrous problems to circuit boards.

“Static is our main enemy,” said Mr Rasmussen. “It is the absolute enemy of modern electronics.”

Access to the new building will be controlled automatically. Work areas will have a fume extraction system, full air conditioning and an air-filtration system. The building will be air-tight.

ITM Soil has to square the circle of making very delicate equipment that is robust enough to survive the rigors of use on a construction site.

“We produce very high quality, highly accurate instruments that you could use in a laboratory but they are not. They are used in a “muck and bullets environment”, as we call it, on a construction site,” Mr Rasmussen said.

“We manufacture a lot of instruments that are used in dams. They go into the base of a dam with several thousand tonnes of concrete on top. If that instrument fails after a couple of years, the customer is not going to be best amused because he has no options to replace the failed sensor, so he will lose data that are potentially critical to the safety of his dam.

“We make sure our equipment is robust enough to withstand all the forces and be reliable in the long term,” he said.

ITM-Soil specialises in designing, manufacturing and installing a wide range of equipment which take measurements of structural or earth movement to ensure the safety of buildings, tunnels, dams, deep excavations, roads and railways as well as landslides in nearly every country around the world.

UK projects include Heathrow Terminal Five, the Channel Tunnel and the new Crossrail project in London. The company works internationally with major projects in Europe, Asia, Australia and South America.