Land + Water shares practical insights into delivering projects across habitats and infrastructure and reflects on its recent growth
Land + Water operates at the intersection of construction and water, focusing on what happens on site, how teams deliver work and how clients see progress. It works across coastal, canal and river environments.
Chief Executive Officer James Maclean begins by explaining how Land + Water has grown into a group with a turnover of £60 million while remaining committed to aquatic habitats. “The business was formed in 1991, although our lineage goes back to 1976,” he shares. He goes on to outline how Land + Water divides its activity across contracting, plant hire, marinas and remediation, always staying close to the point where land meets water. The contracting business delivers marine and environmental projects, focusing on cleaning up the planet and improving flood resilience, with most of its work in and around sensitive aquatic habitats.
James adds further detail on the scope of work, noting, “The team delivers flood defence projects, undertakes marine works and builds and maintains docks, harbours and ports.” He explains that the specialist plant hire division supports both internal projects and external clients, with around half of the fleet working for other organisations.
In addition, Land + Water owns two marinas, operates a third and runs a remediation business currently active at Rainham Marshes alongside the Port of London Authority and the RSPB. James highlights the environmental focus of this work, saying: “We’re using waste soils to rebuild a failing Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and to build nature back in. This is London’s largest nature recovery project ever and we’re doing it at no cost to the taxpayer.”
Protecting intertidal environments
Habitat regeneration sits at the heart of Land + Water’s purpose. James outlines the innovative work that is being done with the Crown Estate, Lymington Harbour Commissioners, and Chichester Harbour Conservancy on salt marsh recovery. He demonstrates why this matters: salt marsh and inter-tidal habitats support the life cycle of around 80 per cent of marine species in UK waters in some way. Climate change threatens these habitats as only small changes in mean sea level have catastrophic effects on the plant species that thrive in these areas. James explains: “We proposed using dredged sediment to rebuild them, instead of dumping it at sea.” He references successful trials and reveals that the team is now developing a three-year strategy with the Crown Estate to scale up the approach.
This positions Land + Water as designer, consenter, enabler, and contractor. James notes that the programme aims to transform how dredging operates in the UK, working with existing maintenance dredging fleets to move material to nearshore locations and salt marshes. He links this to wider coastal pressures and outlines how rising sea levels drive habitat loss. “From 2040 to 2100, the IPCC predicts significant sea level rise in UK coastal waters,” he says, “and intertidal species can only tolerate small changes in height, so it’s important we protect, maintain, and build back (and up!) this critical green infrastructure.”
Referencing seminars, data, and the importance of reusing sediment near each harbour, James points out that Land + Water now partners with clients who share concerns about future coastal challenges. This supports the great work of key stakeholders such as the Blue Marine Foundation, the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust, RSPB, Natural England, the Environment Agency, and the Wildlife Trusts.
“We aren’t going to stop dredging our ports and harbours to maintain shipping navigations, so it’s time we reused the waste sediment as a resource for habitat regeneration, rather than dumping it in the sea in offshore locations,” James states.
To enable all these projects, James touches on recent investment in equipment, explaining that Land + Water has expanded its amphibious machinery to support current and future work in our important intertidal environments. “We’ve got the largest fleet of amphibious excavators in the UK, and we just brought in the two biggest ones in the UK from Malaysia and they’re both already committed for the next 12 months, and they will then be available for shoreline and coastal work,” he says. “This investment places specialist plant at the centre of upcoming projects, ensuring Land + Water can operate effectively in challenging terrain.”
Sensitive solutions
As well as its conservational work with habitat programmes, Land + Water is also involved in major infrastructure projects. James describes the company’s role on the Thames Tideway Super Sewer project, where the team has been involved from the start, dredging and preparing berthing facilities for project logistics eight years ago, through to site preparation, tunnel spoil management (to Land + Water’s facility at Rainham Marshes for reuse), and currently the £15-million complex deconstruction of the final, temporary river structures. He outlines the challenge posed by London’s historic sewer design and how Tideway is creating a massive underground storage tunnel to hold and treat stormwater to help clean up the river. The deconstruction of the massive, temporary cofferdams at Chambers Wharf and King Edward Memorial Gardens have involved complex underwater excavation – subsea cutting of huge concrete piles, deep sheet pile extraction and structure removal – and all in the live watercourse where strict environmental controls mean that nothing at all can be left or dropped in the river.
Outlining how recent years have shaped growth, James clarifies that negotiated contracts drive much of Land + Water’s momentum. He notes that the company’s experience has proved invaluable to these contracts: “Currently, we’re working on another major infrastructure project. We were invited by the client to come up with a solution in a very inaccessible corner of the site where the ground conditions are appalling. We proposed a kind of reverse logic way of delivering it.”
Part of the construction area sits on boggy ground and is crossed by a river within a highly sensitive location. Land + Water is responsible for critical enabling works, safely diverting the river, and installing piling to isolate the site so surrounding habitats remain protected. Crucially, it’s also providing the bridge abutments for a new six-lane-wide access bridge to cross the river and access the working area. “We’re helping preserve the environment and isolate the working areas to enable the conventional heavy civils operations to follow on,” James explains.
At the major infrastructure project, Land + Water has tackled the challenge of difficult ground by turning the task into a floating project rather than trying to make it land-based, using a temporary canal for access and piling operations, rather than importing significant quantities of stone to form a conventional works platform. The approach aligns with its experience and resources and has helped to unlock a complex and sensitive section of works.
Social contribution
James links the company’s recent substantial growth to capability, teammanship, and strong sense of pride in the company’s passion to leave the world a better place, describing Land + Water as a resource-led contractor, with its own equipment and people. “We don’t outsource; we in-source and self-deliver much of our work,” he states. “We have a strong commitment to our teams, and we invest heavily in them and the company culture.”
Indeed, the business is now working towards becoming the UK’s first wholly regenerative contractor, using AI to score nature before, during, and after each project. James believes this approach encourages the team to look beyond simple delivery and focus on social contribution through nature recovery. Summing up with some details about the business’ culture and capacity, James confirms that its biggest priority is preserving its culture. “I value feedback from the workforce and want to maintain our family values as our scale increases,” James concludes.