INTERVIEW | DAVID FAWCETT
He worked on various tunnels in
various geologies for various contractors. “There were sewer tunnels in boulder clay in Dublin, mine grouting in soft rock in Teesside, sandstone rail tunnels in Liverpool” until in 1975 he joined consultancy Babtie Shaw & Morton. Five years working on the Kielder project followed. “That was huge.” Kielder is a dam and
Above: On the Jubilee Line Extension project, London, over the late 1980s-early 90s, consultancy Babtie had the civil design package for Southwark station and the running tunnels from London Bridge to Waterloo. David was project director for the design
water transfer scheme in Northumberland. “I was Resident Engineer on 28km of rock tunnel. It was the early days of rock TBMs, and we had two: one was a Robbins machine from the States and one was a German Demag machine. “We had a European contractor because
European Union – Common Market as it was then – rules which had just come in specified that it had to go to open tendering. Of the two types of machine, the Robbins performed better. All tunnelling machines are prototypes and in those days they were very early prototypes. But they did the job.” hen he went off to South Africa to work
on tunnelling and water projects in Natal; and re-joined Babtie and came back to Britain in 1984. I left Babtie again for a couple of years and worked for tunnelling contractor Lilly Construction (where I also worked with Alastair again), and finally rejoined Babtie, for the third and last time, in 1988. “For the first half of my full-time career
tunnelling was my job; for the second half it became my hobby and has remained as an interest/hobby since I retired from full time work in 2006. “In 1988, when I rejoined them, Babtie
sent me to establish an office in Maidstone. There was nothing and nobody there, just me to start with.” The office soon specialised in the design of tunnels and tunnelling projects. “That wasn’t because I pushed tunnels. Babtie were not mainly tunnelling people, but because I knew tunnels then people came to us to buy tunnels, so tunnels was what we did. During that period I thought of myself as a ‘brush salesman’, just selling designs rather than brushes.” One reason for his success, he believes,
Above: Babtie senior management in the late 1990’s, in Glasgow HQ (David is centre left) 36 | May 2026
was the team he recruited. “I wanted a diverse team. It was not for politically- correct reasons, it was because I wanted lots of different views on every problem. I recruited women, because they approach things differently. I recruited French engineers. One, a guy called Chris, rang me a while back to thank me for giving him a job when no-one else would do so and
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