In February, the Health and Safety Executive finally caved in to demand for a national register of safety checks on tower cranes

The Battersea power station chimney

Balfour Beatty and Parsons Brinckerhoff

The public sector provided the vast bulk of any work there was in 2009, with fears that spending would slow before the election not holding true

The carbon-cutting campaign gathered momentum as the year went on, culminating in the Copenhagen summit of world leaders in December – and a last-minute appearance by US president Barack Obama

The aquatic centre roof lift

The public’s opinion of construction took a hammering in 2009 with the Office of Fair Trading’s allegations of tender malpractice against 110 firms

Construction’s disparate yet oddly indistinguishable trade bodies have, as noted by James Wates some years ago, long borne a worrying resemblance to Monty Python’s Judean People’s Front, the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean Popular…

Prince Charles is well-known in for his vitriol towards all things carbuncular, but nobody could have predicted the row that kicked off when he criticised Richard Rogers’ designs for the Chelsea Barracks scheme in April

“The crisis was predictable and probably avoidable. The final confusion in communication made a bad situation worse”Sir Andrew Foster, former chair of the audit commission, gives his verdict on the Learning and Skills…