Alastair Upton, Chief Executive at the Bluecoat.I’m just back from a meeting with the design team. This is the group of consultants who work for the Bluecoat on the building project including the architects, project managers, quantity surveyor and some engineers. We were going through in as much detail as we can the schedule of works the builders Kier have put forward until completion. While this gives a finish date to the work it is not straight forward as the document comes with two pages of itemised risks that all might delay the works. Most of these are minor but some could have significant consequences.

Our position has always been that we will open in early 2008 by which we mean before April but obviously we want it to be as early in the year as possible. It would of course be foolish to go too early and risk being unfinished.  I’ve now got to assess the risks identified, discount any over optimism by the builders and the pessimism of the architects, discuss the consequences of fixing the opening date with senior staff at the Bluecoat and make a proposal for our board on Monday.

One thing we will have to assess before the opening is the seating for the performance space. There was a proposed seating plan from the consultants worked off the architect’s early drawings which set out the seats and the capacity for the space. Now we are about to agree the seats we have to decide whether to go with the first proposal, which had a large audience size in the centre but it now transpires only for people with pre-pubescent bottom widths, or to make the centre more comfortable and fit extra seats in the side and balcony. There is a trade off between benches which people have to be persuaded to sit close together on or seats with arm rests which guarantee the number of seats but people can’t be squeezed up.

During the seats procurement, when the two bidding firms came to show off their chairs, one firm said in the interview that children could get their fingers jammed in the folding mechanism of their rival’s chairs. After the meeting staff at the Bluecoat spent ages trying to poke their fingers in the mechanism and close the chair on them. Sometimes I think that is what this building project feels like but for months on end.