The Northside Clinic sits eight feet from a working hospital. The brief had one line in bold: no ward closes.

Quiet foundations

Driven piles shake the ground. We bored them instead, with vibration monitors on the theatre wall reporting to my phone.

• Limit set by the hospital's engineers
• Work stopped twice, for eleven minutes in total

One gate

Every delivery came at night through a single managed gate, booked a week ahead.

Dust

A negative-pressure wall ran the length of the shared boundary and was smoke-tested every Monday.

Everybody on my site goes home the way they came in, and so does everybody next door.

What we would repeat

The weekly meeting with the ward managers. They knew our schedule better than some of our subcontractors.