The Mobile Crane – the Boom That’s a Boon for the Construction Industry

Tower Cranes are huge, mechanical things. Those great big boom arms, stretching out across whole city blocks; the turrets and controls that look like they’re about half a mile up in the sky: these are not little things, and they certainly aren’t very easy to move around. A full sized tower crane can take days to erect, requires regular maintenance and costs so much to run that it isn’t worth taking down for months. The mobile crane, which takes half of this hassle away, is a better bet in a whole heap of urban construction situations – a swinging boom with a big difference.

Mobile cranes do exactly what static cranes do – only you can drive them into position on a very large truck. They’re ready to go, typically, within forty five minutes of turning up on site; they can lift almost as much as a static tower crane; and they don’t have to hang around when they aren’t being used. They are, in other words, the boon the construction industry has been looking for since the 1960s. 

In the 60s, the flurry of mainstream urban construction presented some interesting problems to building firms. The modern day mobile crane has evolved as a solution to most of them – but, for the record, here they are. The 60s saw a period of intense regeneration (which, in some senses, is still going on – it’s just rolled over from the original projects) after the war had left much of Britain damaged and the 50s had seen the country with an economy incapable of repairing that damage. Come the 60s, there was money in the bank, and materials in the factories. So the UK started to rebuild herself.

Now, no-one had really tried to rebuild a city before – and they quickly found that trying to install a crane in a city centre to do heavy building work meant traffic chaos and service disruption for months or even years. The mobile crane, then unheard of, could simply have driven up to the build, done its work and left – but back then urban regeneration required static cranes and the closure of whole swathes of city neighbourhoods. The work was done, of course, but at enormous expense and inconvenience.

These days, regeneration is still taking place – mostly regenerating all those areas where shoddy 60s builds have had to be pulled down. This time around, though, the cranes being used have changed dramatically – allowing relatively disruption free entry to even central city blocks, quick lifts and successful builds.

The mobile crane, which has changed the face of modern construction, is changing the face of 60s Britain – taking down all those monstrously built flats and housing estates and replacing them with stuff that works properly. How? Because the crane is better suited to the environment, which means more solid building and better results. Thanks to mobile cranes, the construction industry in Britain can now look forward to remodel old buildings into new with ease.