Week 35, 2026 – Back after the summer: a steel mesh deck covers the plot
Thursday, eight in the morning, the first grey sky in weeks, and after a month away from the fence the site looks like somewhere else. The grey concrete slab from the end of July has disappeared under a dark deck of steel mesh, sheet after sheet of it laid in two layers across most of the plot, with column bars poking up through it at every grid point. A blue mobile crane has its boom stretched high over the entrance, and along the near edge an excavator has opened a trench deep enough that the spoil stands in a brown heap taller than the men working beside it.
A few steps along the street the whole deck opens up. Workers in hi-vis walk across the mesh while bundles of fresh sheets lie waiting on top of it, lifted in by the van der Tol crane. Around the edges the reinforcement turns down into deeper cages for the perimeter beams, with timber boards marking out where the concrete will stop. Closer to the pavement, outside the mesh, the pile caps are still sitting in bare sand with their yellow caps on, and a narrow trench cuts between them for the services.