International marine construction engineers move to new Kenilworth HQ

Picture by Sam Bagnall

Proserve, the award-winning international marine construction engineers, has moved to new headquarters in Kenilworth, Warwickshire.

The company, whose contracts range from floodgates in Venice to a new container terminal in Haiti, has made the move to enable it to handle larger projects and expand its research and development facility.

Martin Hawkswood, director and principal engineer at Proserve, which has just won the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation, is now looking to expand its workforce and is seeking civil engineers and ancillary staff to help take the company forward.

“We are a local company at the cutting edge exporting around the world and we are looking for local people such as civil engineers to help us with our rapid growth,” he said.

The purchase of the new offices, on the Princes Drive Industrial Estate in Kenilworth, was handled by ehB Commercial, the Leamington-based property consultants. ehB director Simon Hain said the building had previously been owned by the Arthur Rank Foundation who used it as a training centre for young adults and the long-term unemployed.

“Proserve, which has been in Kenilworth for 20 years, specialises in marine construction systems for precast and insitu concrete projects. Our engineers use a range of underwater construction techniques to design a variety of construction systems to overcome marine conditions and we also undertake the design of associated maritime works,” said Mr Hawkswood.

“As well as design, we also manufacture fabric formwork systems for insitu construction using concrete and grouts.”

The company is currently working on a number of large projects, sizeable by global standards, including a £2.3m contract for work on the Venice floodgate project;  a £650,000 contract in Haiti as part of a new container terminal after the jetty slipped into the sea during an earthquake; and the Olmsted Dam, Ohio – another huge project.

“We are a niche business, unique, and our biggest growth area is the increased need for deeper ports to handle the new generation of giant container ships that need deeper water,” said Mr Hawkswood.