OBE-holder SallyAnn Kelly has previously held leadership positions at children’s charities

Completions and revenue also up

Developer SevenCapital has restarted work on its £500m 100 Kensington residential scheme after taking control of construction through a group company following the administration of Ardmore.

The developer said Seven Capital (Woodrow) Ltd is now acting as main contractor on the 462-home West Cromwell Road project, where construction had been temporarily halted by Ardmore’s collapse.

Seven Capital (Woodrow) is an existing SevenCapital group company incorporated in 2016 rather than a newly registered business.

A new senior construction management team is now running the job under SevenCapital chief operating officer James Moody, working alongside the group’s construction director and site management team.

SevenCapital in-house delivery team

SevenCapital expects more than 500 workers to be back on the project by the autumn.

The developer said it had been aware of Ardmore’s financial difficulties and had prepared a contingency plan to secure completion of the scheme if the contractor failed.

Moody said: “We had previously been aware of some of the financial issues facing Ardmore, which allowed us the time to develop a solid contingency plan to secure the completion of 100 Kensington should the effective administration happen, and at the same time diversify and extend SevenCapital’s capabilities for future schemes.”

Existing funding from Maslow Capital remains in place. The lender originally provided a £258m four-year development facility for the SevenCapital and MARK Capital Management joint venture, with Ardmore appointed as main contractor.

The project is now more than 30% complete.

Its centrepiece is the 29-storey Oria tower containing 129 private apartments and penthouses. SevenCapital said the tower is due to top out in October.

The wider 1.7ha development will provide 276 private and 186 affordable homes across seven buildings, along with leisure, retail, office and community space.

John McAslan & Partners produced the architectural masterplan, with Corstorphine & Wright responsible for detailed design.

Phased completions are planned from the fourth quarter of 2027, with the overall scheme expected to finish around the end of 2027 or the beginning of 2028.

Specialist engineering contractor McGee suffered a £2.8m pre-tax loss last year after being hit by a £3.6m bad debt from the insolvency of a client on a major London hotel job.

The setback reversed the employee-owned groundwork and demolition firm’s previous-year £5.3m profit as turnover also fell 11% to £134m from £151m in the year to November 2025.

McGee said the exceptional bad debt masked a much stronger underlying performance, with EBITDA margin at 6.5% once the hit was stripped out, compared with 6.3% in 2024.

Reported EBITDA margin fell to just 1.2%.

Results were also squeezed by delays to the start of several projects, leaving the contractor under-recovering support costs and running with lower efficiency across plant, haulage and central functions.

Despite the tougher year, McGee ended November with £13.3m cash, against £16m previously.

The business said it remained debt free apart from normal equipment financing and maintained a 98% on-time supplier payment record.

McGee is now targeting a return to former profit levels as delayed schemes start and a strengthening pipeline converts into workload.

The contractor remains focused on London and the wider M25 market, with recent awards at Heathrow Airport, 50 Baker Street and in the data centre sector.

It has also lined up a major unnamed West End project drawing on its expertise in complex basement and below-ground structures.

The accounts said McGee was seeing more clients bring its McGee Consult engineering team into projects at an earlier stage to help solve planning, logistics and buildability challenges.

This is improving visibility over future workload while allowing the business to remain selective over the projects it takes on.

Group managing director Bernard O’Reilly said: “We enter the year ahead with confidence, a resilient platform and a continued focus on delivering certainty for our clients through our integrated engineering solutions.”

New arrival starts next month as part of firm’s push ‘to deliver increasingly complex and high-value projects’