Why Buildings & Places?

More than buildings.

One week it’s a secondary school in the West Midlands. The next, it’s the masterplan above one of the UK’s most complex rail hubs. Then a heritage museum in Plymouth, social housing in Lambeth, a hospital, a defence headquarters. In Buildings & Places, no two weeks look the same, and that’s exactly why people join us. It’s also why they stay.

Explore our roles in Buildings & Places.

It starts with the people

Ask anyone in our Buildings & Places teams why they’re here and you’ll hear the same thing, usually before you’ve finished the question: “People stay because of the people.”

Those are their words, and we hear them again and again.

In practice, it looks like a graduate who can pick up the phone to a technical director and get a proper answer. Structural engineers who set up their own peer learning circles, simply because they wanted to learn from each other. Teams who rally round each other, in good times and tough ones, and managers who make flexible working work for real lives.

As one of our team put it: “We genuinely care about each other. It’s not just corporate speak.”

Every team has its own character, and the culture lives locally, in the studio or office you’re part of. What connects them all is colleagues who invest in each other.

 Read a Buildings & Places employee story.

The variety is the point

Our work covers almost every kind of building and space that communities rely on. Across the UK and Ireland, our Buildings & Places teams work on:

• Schools, colleges and universities
• Hospitals, health and life sciences
• Local and central government, including justice
• Homes, from social housing to high-end residential
• Masterplanning and regeneration
• Heritage and landmark buildings
• Offices, retail, hotels and warehouses
• Stations, transport hubs and active travel
• Defence and aviation

“No two days are the same” is how our people describe it. A structural engineer might move from a school to a defence HQ to a hospital in the space of a couple of years. That breadth is what builds well-rounded professionals.

A career that’s a portfolio, not a ladder

Because we work across so many sectors, you can change direction without changing employer. Education to health. Health to aviation. Workplace to regeneration. Our people call it building a career without leaving.

It also means working alongside the full range of disciplines that make a building happen: architects, structural engineers, building services engineers, building surveyors, project managers, quantity surveyors and planners, often in the same team and on the same project. We can take a scheme from first idea to finished building in-house, or bring in specialists when a project needs them. Either way, it’s where you learn the most.

Explore our architecture careers.

From the first sketch to the day-to-day

Our work carries on long after a building opens. We masterplan, design and project manage, and we also help clients operate and maintain buildings for years afterwards, from new homes and offices to hospitals, university campuses and landmark heritage buildings. That means careers here span the whole life of a place, from the first sketch to everyday use.

It also means working closely with the people a place is for. We partner with local authorities, developers and communities, and we take the time to understand local issues before we draw a line. The goal is simple: places that work at their best for everyone who uses them, today and for the generations that follow.

Places you can point to

What matters most is what changes for the communities who use our buildings. Here are a few places in the UK where you can see that for yourself:

• The Barbican Podium, City of London. Reimagining London’s largest public open space as a climate-resilient, accessible space for people and wildlife, while protecting one of the city’s most important pieces of heritage.
• Hillside Gardens, Lambeth. Using modern methods of construction to turn underused land into sustainable social housing.
• The Box, Plymouth. Transforming a Grade II museum, library and church into a cultural destination with seven galleries and a new public piazza.
• Euston, London. Integrated masterplanning to create a new urban destination above one of the UK’s most complex rail hubs.
• Manchester Digital Campus. Reimagining a constrained brownfield site as a connected digital campus, and delivering it in phases alongside the city’s own ambitions.
• The Bedlands Academy, West Midlands. A net-zero-ready secondary school designed to be an inspiring place to learn.
• Lisburne School, Greater Manchester, UK. Inclusive SEND school that combines sustainable design, nature-connected learning environments and specialist facilities to support wellbeing, independence and positive outcomes for every pupil.
• Teesworks, Teesside. Helping regenerate 4,500 acres of former steelworks into a hub for clean energy and advanced manufacturing.

Part of something bigger

Buildings & Places is part of AtkinsRéalis, so you get the backing, training and reach of a major engineering and design business. But the work, and the teams, are rooted here, in cities and towns across the UK and Ireland.

Join us

The places we work on today are where people across the UK and Ireland will live, learn, and come together for decades to come. Come and help shape them.

If you want variety, a team that backs you, and work you can point to, we’d love to hear from you.

Explore Buildings & Places careers, or join our talent community to stay connected.