History of Quantity Surveyor

Prior to the Napoleonic Wars, Britain, in common with its conti nental neighbours, had a construction industry based on separate trades.
This system still exists in France as ‘lots sépare’, and variations of it can be found throughout Europe, including in Germany. The system works like this: instead of the multi-traded main contractor that operates in the UK, each trade is tendered for, and subsequently engaged separately under, the coordination of a project manager.

The Napoleonic Wars, however, brought change and nowhere more so than in Britain – the only large European state that Napoleon failed to invade or occupy. The government of the day was obliged to construct barracks to house the huge garrisons of soldiers who were then being transported across the English Channel. As the need for the army barracks was so urgent and the time to prepare drawings, specifi cations, etc. was so short, the contracts were let on a ‘settlement by fair valuation based on measurement after completion of the works’. This meant that constructors were given the opportunity and encouragement to innovate and to problem solve – something that was progres sively withdrawn from them in the years that followed.

The same need for haste, coupled with the sheer magnitude of the individ ual projects, led to many contracts being let to a single builder or group of tradesmen ‘contracting in gross’, and the general contractor was born. When peace was made the Offi ce of Works and Public Buildings, which had been increasingly concerned with the high cost of measurement and fair value procurement – in particular, in the construction of Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle – decided that enough was enough. In 1828 separate trades contracting was discontinued for public works in England in favour of contracting in gross.

The following years saw contracting in gross (general contracting) rise to dominate, and with this development the role of the builder as an innovator, problem-solver and design team member was stifl ed to the point where contractors operating in the UK system were reduced to simple executors of the works and instructions (although in Scotland the separate trades system survived until the early 1970s).

Then in 1834 archi tects decided that they wished to divorce them selves from surveyors and establish the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), exclusively for architects. The grounds for this great schism were that architects wished to distance themselves from surveyors and their perceived ‘obnoxious commercial interest in construction’. The events of 1834 were also responsible for the birth of another UK phenomenon, the quantity surveyor.

Source: Quantity Surveyor’s Pocket Book