Top 10 project reports of the year

10) Intu dazzles shoppers with glass roof and floor

At Manchester’s Trafford Centre, £75m is being spent on regenerating a wing known as Barton Square. With Vinci on board, Intu is aiming to add some extra theatre to the UK’s third-largest shopping centre. In May, CN took a tour.

 9) Inside Canary Wharf’s newest resi skyscraper: One Park Drive

One Park Drive is set to tower over a swathe of retail, commercial and residential buildings shooting up in the overhauled Wood Wharf area. CN visited in May.

8) Factory records: Laing O’Rourke installs 160-tonne doors

From building above historic railways to installing massive soundproof doors, Laing O’Rourke has had to innovate to meet Manchester City Council’s exacting demands, as we found earlier this month.

7) Vinci links past and present

May saw CN visit the Tideway scheme in the east, as contractors sought solutions to join London’s super-sewer with its Victorian predecessor.

6) Prefab school build adds up for Berkeley

Reds10 claimed its modular school scheme in the heart of a new residential quarter in Reading was making a big cost saving compared with traditional methods. In August, CN went to see the build in action.

5) Building into the water for Thames Tideway

Work by Ferrovial and Laing O’Rourke to prevent overflow sewage from entering the river involves the tricky job of floating a culvert into place, as CN found in October.

4) Hinkley's ‘three megaprojects in one’

Amid cost hikes and potential delays on the project, we paid an exclusive visit in October to the huge Hinkley Point C site.

3) Bam builds at the end of the Earth

Bam Nuttall is braving killer whales, icebergs and stark isolation in Antarctica to deliver a new wharf in time for the arrival of the RRS Sir David Attenborough. CN assessed progress at the start of the six-month building period.

2) Lendlease’s ‘Lego-like’ timber build

September saw CN visit an offsite development at Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park – a timber pavilion that is being built above the busy Docklands Light Railway.

1) Inside Leicester City FC’s new training ground

In November, CN headed to Leicestershire, as the main contractor faced a race against time to build a state-of-the-art training ground for the city’s Premier League football club in time for next season.