McBains appoints Manchester project director: delivery and cost insights for project teams
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on The Construction Index
30 Second Briefing
McBains has appointed chartered quantity surveyor Sarah Seasman as project director in its Manchester office to strengthen its North West operations after two years of significant team growth. Seasman joins from Atkins Réalis, where as Regional Director she led commercial and project delivery on Manchester City Council’s £300m+ Our Town Hall programme, Co-op Group’s £120m+ National Retail Refit Programme and Liverpool John Moores University’s £16m Henry Cotton Building. Her track record on complex, high-value refurbishments and estate programmes signals McBains’ intent to target larger public and private frameworks across the region.
Technical Brief
- Role is framed as providing strategic commercial and project leadership rather than pure cost control.
- Chartered quantity surveyor status signals RICS-aligned procurement, valuation and contract administration capability.
- Experience base is explicitly North West–centric, covering Manchester and Liverpool institutional and civic estates.
- Exposure to multi-hundred-million-pound frameworks suggests familiarity with multi-lot procurement and call-off mechanisms.
- Background in major refurbishment programmes implies comfort with live-asset phasing, decant strategies and heritage constraints.
- Appointment follows “significant growth” in the Manchester team over two years, indicating rising regional workload.
- For regional clients, move signals deeper bench strength for long-duration, multi-stakeholder estate transformation programmes.
Our Take
McBains’ appointment on Manchester City Council’s £300m+ Our Town Hall programme and the Co-op Group’s £120m+ National Retail Refit Programme sits alongside its recent healthcare and education work, such as the £250m Sussex Cancer Centre and the Bradford Royal Infirmary endoscopy unit, signalling a deliberate push into complex public-estate portfolios across the UK.
The concentration of sizeable projects in Manchester and the wider North West contrasts with national data in our coverage showing new work softening while repair and maintenance rises, suggesting McBains is positioning its Manchester team to capture refurbishment-heavy pipelines rather than relying on greenfield schemes.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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