GeoScreen now covers Scotland. You can order a report for any site in England, Wales or Scotland, at the same price, with the same hazard ratings and the same 18 figures. When we added Wales in the summer, most of the work was swapping data sources: Natural Resources Wales instead of the Environment Agency, Cadw
I'm based in County Durham, so mining legacy comes up a lot. Most of the deep pits closed decades ago, and the ground they left behind usually looks like any other field, playing field or housing estate. You'd never know it was there. It's one of the best-recorded ground risks we have, and it still
More data doesn't automatically make an assessment better — it depends on what the extra data is actually doing. A few different things get lumped under "more data," and they're not all the same kind of improvement. Coverage is the obvious one. No single public dataset covers everything a site assessment needs — flood risk,
Compressible ground and shrink-swell clay are two different ways the same clay can cause problems for a foundation — one's settlement under load, the other's volume change with moisture content. They're separate failure mechanisms, and until recently GeoScreen rated them from different evidence: shrink-swell from the bedrock beneath a site, compressible ground only from soft
Every rating GeoScreen produces comes from an explicit rule, not a guess. That's the whole idea the product's built on, so it's worth actually explaining what sits behind that claim rather than just stating it and moving on. Before a report reaches anyone, it goes through two checks. One is rule-based and checks the output
Every GeoScreen tier runs on the same idea — an explicit rule behind every rating, not a guess. Tier 2 has been in development for a while now, and it's worth actually explaining why, rather than leaving it as "coming soon." The obvious answer — it just needs an engineer's time on top of what
GeoScreen has, until now, been an England-only product. That was a deliberate scope decision at launch — better to be reliable across one nation than thin across three. As of this update, that scope has grown: GeoScreen now covers Wales, with the same rule-governed rating engine, the same figure set, and the same discipline about
When we were developing GeoScreen, we weren't trying to replace the traditional consultancy model. We were trying to address the gaps it can't economically service — the situations where good ground risk work was either too slow to arrive, too expensive to justify, or simply not viable at the scale or speed a project demanded.
If you've worked in ground engineering or development for any length of time, you'll be familiar with the phased approach to site investigation. It's one of the most well-established principles in geotechnical practice: build knowledge progressively, let each stage inform the next, and don't commission intrusive investigation until you understand what you're looking for. GeoScreen's
When I built GeoScreen, the goal was straightforward: take the datasets a competent geotechnical engineer would check and automate the interrogation so nothing gets missed under time pressure. The platform launched with a core stack: a set of geohazard ratings built on BGS geology, EA flood mapping, and heritage and ecology datasets. But after running
