There is a particular kind of confidence that comes from having set the line and level of a tunnel as a 19-year-old on work placement. Richard Bonner – now UK managing director of buildings and places at AtkinsRéalis – recalls standing inside Canary Wharf around five years ago, gazing down from a tower and counting the six manhole covers that mark the route of a sewer connection he helped build at the very start of his career. 

‘That little quarter of a kilometre of tunnel,’ he says, ‘could only see about six manhole covers. And it struck me that that time in London was fundamental. It was one of the physical pieces of infrastructure that unlocked Canary Wharf. Without it, Canary Wharf wouldn’t function. That was great, and I was really energised by that’. 

It is the kind of story that reveals a lot: an engineer’s instinct for the hidden infrastructure that makes cities work, and a genuine delight in the unglamorous but essential. 

Bonner grew up in Stalybridge, just on the edge of the Pennines between Manchester and Leeds, studied civil engineering in Birmingham and never quite made it back north – though the north has never quite left him. He sits on the Northern Powerhouse Partnership board and speaks with feeling about the generation of talented young people who, like him, felt they had to leave to find opportunity. ‘We want to make sure that the talent that exists knows that they’ve got the ability to come back to the north to have fulfilling lives and careers through much better economic opportunity.’ 

In between Stalybridge and his current role, Bonner has accumulated a career of considerable range. Notably, there was a spell with Mott MacDonald in Hong Kong – arriving just before the handover and working on Chek Lap Kok airport alongside Foster + Partners and Ove Arup – which gave him an early taste for large-scale international programmes and the cultural complexity they entail. With Balfour Beatty working on the project too, and significant investment in the Tsing Ma bridge, roads and rail, it was a great time to be there for a whirlwind 12 months or so.  ‘The excitement of doing something of that size and scale felt very formative,’ he reflects. ‘It’s always stuck with me, that sense of bringing large international teams together towards a big, big project and the sort of cultural challenges that entails, but the excitement of doing something of a size and scale of that significance. It felt very pioneering!’ He spent time in other organisations operating across major infrastructure and regeneration including Carillion before joining AtkinsRéalis three years ago. 

Six months ago, Bonner was handed the task of bringing together two distinct AtkinsRéalis businesses that had been running in parallel: the legacy Atkins design and engineering team he had originally joined, and the former Faithful+Gould project and programme management arm. ‘I’m absolutely thrilled to have got the opportunity to really contribute to the next stage of our evolution’, he says. Moving 2,000 people into a single business unit is not a small undertaking, and he is candid about the work involved. ‘Moving 2,000 people into a new business unit comes with its own focus, engagement and challenges and opportunities. We’re through that now and up and focused on all the great things ahead. 

The integration is part of a wider ambition to continue the company's growth trajectory and, as it puts it, either maintain or establish itself as a leading player across its markets. The unification of its buildings and places business is a stepping stone towards that: by removing internal seams, the thinking goes, the organisation can present a more coherent face to a market that increasingly rewards joined-up thinking. 

What distinguishes AtkinsRéalis from comparable organisations, in Bonner’s view, is a combination of unusual assets. The group is Canadian-listed, with significant shareholding from Canadian pension funds, which brings a heritage in infrastructure concessions that few UK consultancies can match. More striking still: the organisation owns the CANDU nuclear technology and operates nuclear power plants in North America and elsewhere. ‘We have some unique attributes,’ he says. ‘We’re probably the only organisation among our peers that actually has a nuclear business’. That, he argues, generates a depth of understanding about highly regulated, complex infrastructure that translates directly into the advisory and design work the firm does in the UK. It also has a ‘very strong track record’ in being trusted by government, Bonner adds, to deliver significant projects in complex environments, whether in defence, infrastructure or, as it is doing, on dealing with the post-Grenfell cladding crisis. 

Ask Bonner where the most interesting work is happening right now, and he talks not about buildings but about the investment case for places. The language is deliberate: he has been trying to shift the mindset of his teams away from the excitement of delivery and towards a more fundamental question of why something is being built at all. ‘In everything we do, we’re making an investment case for somebody to invest,’ he says. ‘Sometimes we quite overlook the idea that, in a world of challenges around viability and fight for capital, we’ve got to get much more centred on helping our clients make that case’. 

Importantly and philosophically, Bonner goes on, the company recognises that so much of its work is centred on people. ‘Engineering a better future for the planet and its people’ is the mantra: ‘genuinely reflecting on how we transform not just the lives but the communities, often who are quite disadvantaged in many respects. I think our people are really welcoming that impact on the projects where they live and work, and thinking about making a difference in and around the communities where they live and work. And so we've been really focused on bringing those stories to life as we've been getting out working with our teams, demonstrating the benefits of working more cohesively together.’ 

Liverpool Central is a case in point. The station – ‘really down at heel, right in the heart of the city centre’ – is pivotal to the proposed Liverpool-Manchester rail line and, in Bonner’s framing, to the broader unlocking of the city region’s growth potential: connections to the knowledge quarter with the universities, to Lime Street and Liverpool One and to the wider strategic estate. AtkinsRéalis is working with the Liverpool City Region mayor Steve Rotherham on what will be one of four national pilots for the new Green Book place-based business case model. The work brings together the firm’s masterplanning, infrastructure and advisory skills in a single commission - and it is precisely the kind of joined-up engagement that Bonner believes differentiates his organisation. 

The role of metro mayors runs through a lot of what Bonner describes. He sees the empowerment of combined authorities through devolution as the most significant structural shift in UK development politics for a generation. Mayors, in his view, provide the figurehead that inward investors need, the convening power to align multiple local authority stakeholders, and the focused funding streams to make things happen. ‘They’re equipped with the powers, the ability to create Mayoral Development Corporations,’ he says. “You know, London has had that benefit for a long, long time’, with recent decisions over things like Oxford Street. Indeed, Bonner was at MIPIM earlier this year and came away struck by the continued enthusiasm of UK cities to pitch for international capital. The mayors, he says, have a big role in that, not least in providing ‘figureheads’ to deal with inward investors. 

I quiz him about London, and Bonner is clear-eyed. ‘Let’s not undersell it – it’s one of the greatest cities in the world,’ he says. “But it’s still a hard sell at the moment.’ The confidence boost needed to shift the housing market, he argues, is closely tied to sorting out the policy landscape that followed the Building Safety Act, resolving the tension in affordable housing metrics, and getting the story right on major growth hubs. Old Oak Common and Thamesmead are two he thinks still need sharper narratives. Bonner is currently working with Taylor Wimpey on the Thamesmead extension and is excited about what comes next. Euston, too, is a project he watches with particular interest: AtkinsRéalis has been working with Network Rail on the interface between HS2 and the existing station for a number of years, and Bonner was pleased to see the tunnel boring machines leave for Old Oak recently. Lord Hendy’s push to bring partners together with greater cohesion, he says, is exactly the right direction. 

Not everything AtkinsRéalis does fits the profile of a large technical consultancy. Bonner mentions almost in passing that the firm has created a product – and a company – called EDAROTH (Everybody Deserves a Roof Over Their Heads). This, it transpires, is a Modern Methods of Construction platform, developed in response to a direct government challenge about housing, targeting local authority and registered provider clients. The system is panellised rather than volumetric: precision-engineered wall, facade, roof and ceiling components assembled on site quickly, with the building watertight within days. It is, Bonner notes, one of very few products to have achieved BoPAS accreditation - the standard that mortgage lenders use to validate a 50-year-plus lifecycle. The first homes are now completing in Epsom; a portfolio of around 30-40 units across five or six sites in Bristol will follow. The manufacturing partner is a firm in Bradford whose core business was, until recently, shopfitting. ‘AtkinsRéalis will step up and do some pretty innovative things,’ Bonner says. 

On the digital side, the organisation is working on several fronts. The National Underground Asset Register – a government-partnered platform to give developers and stakeholders a single source of truth on underground infrastructure - is already live. Work with the GLA on the Land4LDN platform – a digital tool to manage and identify land for housing across the capital – is ongoing. And AtkinsRéalis has developed an AI-driven planning application assessment tool which, in proof-of-concept trials, demonstrated a high degree of accuracy in predicting whether an application should be approved or declined, based on the submission set against local planning policy. Bonner is careful to frame this not as a replacement for planning officers, but as a way of freeing them for the qualitative judgements - design quality, contextual fit, community engagement - that actually require human attention. ‘If we can move forward with these types of solutions, it should be a better outcome for the long-term quality of development.’ 

Asked what he would change about the way the UK commissions and delivers major urban projects, Bonner does not hesitate. Two things, he says. First, making commitments on infrastructure and holding them: the credibility that comes from consistency is, in his view, as valuable as any individual policy decision. Second, moving at pace on the policy landscape - and doing so in a joined-up way across government departments. He cites the Office for Investment as a model of what cross-departmental collaboration can look like when it works: “It’s not a natural place, but if we can do more to encourage government to join the dots across departments - whether that’s DfE and Homes England and MHCLG aligning on housing and schools investment - then that matters.”. In other words, to mirror your own organisation, I suggest. ‘That’s a really good way of putting it.’ 

Back in Stalybridge, a generation of young people is growing up in a place of considerable beauty, Bonner says, surrounded by the Pennines, connected by rail to two great cities. What is missing is the sense that opportunity is reachable without leaving. It is, in miniature, the argument he has been making across his career: that infrastructure is not an end in itself, but a means of changing the life chances of the communities it serves. 

That tunnel under Canary Wharf taught him that at 19; Bonner has not stopped believing it since.