Friars Walk Shopping Centre Development

The main blip photo is of the Friars Walk Development in Newport City Centre, that is being built by Bowmer & Kirkland Contractors at a cost of nearly £61.5 million and due for completion October 2015.

My friend Paul has the contract to film and photograph the construction on a week by week basis, and he invited me along to take the stills with his Nikon D800 camera whilst he did the videoing on his Black Magic video camera with stabilised gimbal. We were given hard hats, steel toe cap boots, and visibility jackets, and accompanied around by the site manager for health and safety reasons.

Newport is the third largest city in Wales with a population of 138,800. The Friars Walk development will provide a completely new shopping and leisure experience for the region.There will be a wide selection of retailers and a three-level department store, plenty of new restaurants, an eight-screen cinema, car parking for approximately 335 cars and an adjoining multi-storey car park operated by the Kingsway Centre providing a further 1050 spaces.

Besides the main one I took with my camera, I took one of the quad-copter doing some aerial videoing, and another showing the centre of the site.

There contractors were quite amused by the quad-copter and stopped work to take a closer look and ask questions.