West One's Broadcasting House Tops out

Well, after thousands of tonnes of concrete, lots of steel and a lot of hard work the West One Broadcasting House construction project reached a key milestone recently - it was topped out.

This is a curious tradition in the building industry which originates from Scandanavia and has been adopted across the UK,Western Europe and the USA - it has been around for some time and prompted me to look back at the last time the BBC did a topping out at Portland Place back in 1932 when the original Broadcasting House was built.

For our project today we're right on target to deliver this amazing building for technical fit-out at the end of 2010 - it's a very big job and I could bore you with lots and lots of statistics but here are a few as a taster:

• some of the concrete beams used in the structure are so big you could drive a minibus along them
• you could fit 70 London buses into the central area of the new building
• all of the floorspace equates to ten football pitches

There is also the very cool animation of the building developing to see below - with thanks to Bovis for granting permission to use.