The right-sized trenchless contractor

Who we are

The company was formed in 2005 by Steve Wilson, who had already spent around a decade in construction and brought a deep grounding in specialist plant and engineering to it. Chris Weatherall joined in 2008, having trained and worked as an aircraft engineer before moving into trenchless installation, bringing a precision-engineering mindset to how we design and build crossings. Two owners who came up through the work itself, and who are still on site running the difficult jobs today.

Over the years since, we have completed well over 5,000 separate installations for more than 500 clients, at a success rate above 99% on the bores we attempt. That track record is built on taking the awkward work. Deep gravity drainage drilled to falls, large-diameter pipe through rock, crossings under live carriageways, railways and tidal rivers. Where other contractors see a problem, we see the job.

Trenchless drainage is one of our real strengths, often somewhere between a third and a half of everything we do, most of it delivered by directional drilling and pipe ramming. We are one of very few contractors who have been installing it this way for long enough to have the experience the difficult schemes demand, which is why we are recognised as a market leader for trenchless drainage.

We are a genuinely right-sized contractor. Too technical for a general groundworker to attempt, but without the overheads and slow programmes of the national firms, so the price and the pace both work in your favour. We own and operate two directional drilling rigs, two pipe rammers, impact moling tools, rod pushers, an eight-tonne excavator and a range of supporting plant, and we hire in additional equipment whenever a job calls for it. Every site is run by specialist teams who are fully qualified for the work in hand.

We also own our plant and vehicle fleet outright rather than financing it. That keeps the business on a sound financial footing, the kind of stability clients and main contractors want to see before they hand over a critical crossing.

We make our own tooling

One thing sets us apart from almost every other drilling contractor. We have our own machine shop. Some of our machine-shop team carry over 40 years of experience in design and manufacturing, the majority of it spent on trenchless equipment, so we design and make our own reamers, hole openers and support kit, custom to the ground on each job. When a bore hits something unexpected, made ground, buried steel, a band of harder rock, we can adapt or build the tool we need rather than wait days for parts to ship from the US or Europe.

That capability is exactly why we can take on bespoke crossings others will not, and why we finish jobs that have defeated other methods. On our 900mm drainage outfall at Hopton, the bore struck buried ironworks steel partway through. We adapted our tooling on site and still delivered within 10% of the quote. Read the Hopton case study.

Where we work

Our base is at Thorpe Thewles, near Stockton-on-Tees, and we are strongest and best known across the North East. The rig and crew travel, though, so we drill the length and breadth of the United Kingdom, and beyond. Recent crossings run from grid-connection cable ducts in South Gloucestershire to a tidal river main in Somerset, alongside our home-patch work across Teesside, County Durham and the North.

We do a good deal of work in the South West of England, in part because the initials catch the eye. The "S.W." is actually Steve Wilson, not south-west, but it is a happy coincidence with the region we travel to often. Over the years we have drilled as far north as Aberdeen and Inverness, as far south-west as Truro in Cornwall, and across Wales and Northern Ireland. We have even taken a crossing overseas to Malta. Wherever the job is, we will get there.