How meaningful can a “competition” be? Does winning an “Award” actually reflect any more than just a populist majority among those perhaps seduced into voting by the promise of potential personal reward (“free weekend in paradise for one lucky voter!”).

The bigger, bolder competitions demand huge fields of entry and rely on generating mass public interest in order to both attract attention and convey status to the eventual winner – biggest is best!

However, it is actually those smaller affairs, where the winner is determined not by mass appeal but by the minute dissection of technical scrutiny by experts, where the real status of winning – of being the best – is achieved.

To drill down to the smaller, more specialised areas of the construction industry, is to find a level of expertise among building crafts that are rarely appreciated outside the industry and it is when such talents are recognised and rewarded from within a sector, that it becomes so significant to those from outside.

When the Association of specialist leadwork contractors announces the name of the best leadwork project completed that year:

* it is not the entry that received the most votes from the general public
* it is not the entry that used the most lead sheet on one site
* it is not the entry from a name-dropping public building / royal palace / London landmark
* it is not the entry submitted by the largest member of the Lead Contractors Association

The Winner of the LCA Murdoch Award is quite simply the best technical design and installation of leadwork that has been viewed by the panel of experts appointed to scrutinise the entries put forward by specialist leadwork contractors throughout the UK – the best of the best.

For those working at the very pinnacle of the craft skills sector of the construction industry, there is no higher accolade than to have one’s work formally recognised and appreciated by one’s peers. Such recognition is always accompanied by the supreme satisfaction of having been judged by those who are exposed on a daily basis to the skills of the craft at the highest level.

Winner of the Murdoch Award – the ultimate accolade in leadwork.