Paradise Birmingham

Most people have a very binary relationship with heights.

Either they’re perfectly happy with them, or they’re not: there’s seldom anything in between.

So it’s just as well that 39-year old Martin Piskorek grew used to heights as a child because his latest workplace sees him – literally – dangling in mid-air from the top of an 80 metre tower crane in the very heart of Birmingham.

For Martin this is not just a job, but a family passion. Martin, whose father spent 35 years managing cranes in his native Poland, spent twelve years training as a sports acrobat in Warsaw before finally following in his father’s footsteps.

At Paradise the tower crane operator is one of a series of essential jobs that enables the whole site to tick over. Martin and his BAM colleagues are amongst the very first to arrive on site at 7am every morning and the last to leave every evening.

Everything they need has to be hauled up a series of twelve six metre high ladders at the start of the day and brought back down again at the end. And it can be a very long day. Drivers rotate between the different cranes to keep themselves fresh during the shift. There’s always one spare driver available.

Tower cranes have enabled modern construction techniques to flourish and support just-in-time delivery of materials. Large buildings – especially tall buildings – could not be built without them. And while the latest building to go up at Paradise, Two Chamberlain Square, is hardly a skyscraper, it is still a solid forty metres high, has 183,000 square feet of space and covers eight floors. Every one of those floors will weigh more than 1,500 tonnes once finished.

All the concrete, steel, glass, pipework, cladding and mechanics going into the building has to be lifted into place by one of the two tower cranes that frame either side of the site like big yellow giants with outstretched arms.

Martin says:

Every morning when I come up it takes my breath away. And every day is different. The weather, the view over the city, the work involved. I never get bored of it.

The view from Martin’s cab stretches south to the Lickey and Clent Hills, west to the Black Country, east towards Coventry and north to Walsall and Sutton Coldfield. The whole city is spread out at his feet.

But as well as doing all of the heavy lifting for the construction process, crane drivers like Martin also act as valuable eyes in the sky. His unique perspective makes him expert at keeping a watch on everything going on below.

Martin continues:

“I’m in a privileged position. I can see everything from up here, so if I spot something that’s not quite right, something you can’t see from the ground, I can let someone know.”

Today’s crane cabs bristle with technology, with electronic monitoring systems measuring not just loads, but also the weather and outside conditions.

“I’m constantly in touch with the crane manager,’ says Martin, ‘so even though you are by yourself most of the day, you are never lonely. There simply isn’t time with deliveries and work constantly going on to think about much else other than the job.

“This is a great project. At the moment the BAM team on Two Chamberlain Square is constructing one floor every couple of weeks, so this building is really shooting up. The summer weather has really helped and hopefully the people who walk past the site every day can see how things are changing.”