RICS at 150: 1868 - 2018, celebrating 150 years

1868 - 2018

Celebrating 150 years

The 150th anniversary of RICS has been an opportunity to reflect on all that our profession has achieved since 1868. RICS has been at the forefront of some of the most remarkable developments in human history, as technological advancements have taken us to previously untouched parts of our world, to the depths of the oceans, and even into space.

This pioneering spirit has been something of a constant throughout our celebratory year. From sponsoring the Arctic Return expedition and retracing the steps of Dr John Rae, through to launching our Cities for our Future competition which challenged young professionals to find solutions to some of the most pressing issues of our time, we have looked to the past, present and future, and found ourselves even more inspired for the opportunities ahead.

I am proud of the way that our profession has come together to celebrate this great occasion and would like to thank everyone around the world who made it so special. Here’s to the next 150 years!

Chris Brooke FRICS RICS President

When John Clutton and 20 other surveyors met to establish what we now call RICS, I doubt they imagined it growing to cover 130,000 members working across the globe. It’s a remarkable achievement, and it shows that their vision for a profession bound by standards and trust remains as relevant as ever.

This year has been filled with highlights for me, most notably welcoming our Royal Patron, Her Majesty The Queen, to our London headquarters. We’ve shed light on the serious issue of youth homelessness, which goes right to the heart of our Royal Charter as being for the public advantage. Our Cities for our Future competition saw young professionals develop innovative solutions to urbanisation, climate change and resource scarcity, some of the greatest challenges of our time.

Ultimately, we’ve used this landmark anniversary as an opportunity to think more than ever about what RICS and the profession need to do to keep succeeding in the future.

Looking ahead, the importance of RICS’ leadership in shaping the built and natural environments is only set to grow. I have no doubt at our next big anniversary we’ll have even more to celebrate.

Sean Tompkins RICS CEO

David Duffy

(the Lost Shtetl, Poland)

George Everest

(trigonometry survey of India)

Pride in the Profession Our flagship campaign focused on profiling the huge contribution that chartered surveyors have made to society, and to the management and development of the natural and built environment around the world over the last 150 years.

64 full profiles published

Elaine Jones

(transforming Dubai’s skyline)

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(Panama Canal expansion)

Over 165 crowdsourced examples were submitted

John Clutton

(founder of RICS)

Vote now open to find the Top 10 surveyors

Arsenio Bakker

Vote here

Irene Barclay

(first female chartered surveyor)

Michael Moir (Hong Kong Jockey Club)

Cities for our Future

76% of those engaging in the campaign are under 35

Our Cities for our Future competition was a great success in encouraging young professionals, startups and students all over the world to share their transformative ideas to overcome future global challenges. Earl Patrick Forlales of South East Asia was the winner of our ÂŁ50,000 prize, with his vision to create low cost, modular housing for low-income communities in Manila, through the use of bamboo and plastic waste. We were supported in this campaign by UNESCO and the Association of Commonwealth Universities.

Audience split

47% Female

Panel of

5 global judges

53% Male

1,200 entries

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47 RICS professionals involved in the judging process with 12 RICS professionals mentoring the winners

Widespread international coverage in over

PR reach of

20 countries

585 million

50 million

5

social media tier one media outlets impressions covered the announcement

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Our winner Earl Patrick Forlales, a 23-year-old from Manila, won the Cities for our Future competition with an idea that will help solve the city of Manila’s slum housing crisis.

CUBO – a project to build new, low-cost and environmentally friendly housing units – received £50,000 prize money to start work next year.

Manila is one of the fastest growing megacities in East Asia, with a population of 12 million people. The city will soon be at breaking point, with an additional 2.5 million workers moving to the city in the next three years to work on the government’s infrastructure programme. These workers will join the four million Manilans – a third of the city’s current population – who live in abject slums.

To combat this epidemic of substandard living, Earl has designed a new type of modular housing that will be used to house the incoming worker population in the short term, before being applied to the rest of the city’s slum community. The housing is both affordable (at just £60 per square metre) and fast to build (four hours per unit). Earl chose to use bamboo for CUBO’s construction, inspired by his grandparent’s rural bamboo house for its abundance in the region. It is also environmentally friendly, with waste used as a resource (converted into, amongst other things, biochar). The material is both treated and laminated, meaning that its lifecycle is 10 times as long as normal bamboo.

Exhibition We transformed our library at RICS headquarters into a 150th anniversary exhibition. During the year we hosted many events and celebrations, including all our new member receptions and careers events.

The exhibition featured a replica Penfold Post box designed by founding members of RICS and the organisation’s first Honorary Secretary, John Wornham Penfold. As well as a LEGO model of the RICS headquarters – which took over 150 hours to build and 13,000 miniature bricks to construct.

To ensure we reached as wide an audience as possible, our 150th mobile exhibitions hit the road, travelling to the World Built Environment Forum Summit in London and the annual RICS China Awards.

Over 3,000 visitors enjoyed the space and learnt about the history and the future of the profession Please rollover images to find out more

Cities for our Future

RICS at 150

Films / collateral To mark our 150th anniversary, we commissioned several films to illustrate the depth and breadth of the profession.

Pride in the Profession

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Global trends and challenges

“We all felt an amazing sense of pride to be in Her Majesty’s presence”

2 royal visits “It was a real honour and privilege to be introduced to Her Majesty this week: a memory that I shall always treasure”

Royal visits We were delighted to host two royal visits to mark our 150th anniversary.

We were honoured to welcome HRH The Duke of Cambridge in November 2017 to attend the launch of our Pledge150 campaign, which aims to deliver more homes for the homeless. In November 2018, we welcomed our patron, Her Majesty The Queen, to Parliament Square where she met our charity champions, younger members of the profession and toured our exhibition. It was a wonderful occasion and a fitting end to our 150th anniversary year.

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“A very successful day for RICS”

“You put together a fantastic group of amazing individuals full of humility and delight to share this special once-in-alifetime moment”

Honorary Chartered Surveyor – Dr John Rae

70 people attended

On 13 September 2018, RICS conferred the title of Honorary Chartered Surveyor on Dr John Rae. Rae’s discovery of the missing link to the Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago was a culmination of his skills as an explorer, surveyor and survivalist. Just one of his many achievements, Rae trekked 500-miles by foot from Moose Factory, near the southwestern tip of James Bay, to Toronto to train as a surveyor.

There he learned how to use measurement devices, such as the octant, to accurately map unchartered landscapes. Rae used these skills in over four expeditions in the Canadian Arctic between 1846 and 1854, travelling more than 13,000 miles and mapping approximately 1,800 miles of coast. His ability to travel such distance, in often extreme conditions, relied in no small part upon his friendship, and tutelage from northern Canada’s subarctic indigenous peoples.

In 2019, RICS is sponsoring the Arctic Return Expedition, which retraces the 650-kilometre trek across Boothia Peninsula made by Dr John Rae Please rollover images to find out more

150 dinners and events around the world To celebrate our 150th anniversary, we held dinners and celebratory events around the world. Here are some highlights:

Japan 150 Dinner

Southeast Asia 150 Dinner

Washington DC 150 Celebration

New York 150 Celebration

London 150 Dinner

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Netherlands Annual Event

China Awards 2018

Africa 150 Lunch

MIPIM, Cannes – March 2018 At the world’s leading real estate event, RICS’ stand featured our interactive 150th digital assets on Pride in the Profession and promoted our Cities for our Future challenge.

RICS School of Built Environment celebrations In March, students, faculty and employees came together to wish RICS a happy 150th by creating a human 150 formation, portraying unity and pride.

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Giving something back As a professional body with the public good at our core, we have been working to give something back this year. Highlights include:

Pledge150 has made a significant contribution to helping end youth homelessness. In December, CEO Sean Tompkins and President Chris Brooke joined employees in raising £14,000 by participating in the sleep-out in Edinburgh.

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UK

Americas

We launched our Pledge150 campaign, in partnership with LandAid, in November 2017. The launch event was attended by HRH The Duke of Cambridge.

RICS has committed to delivering 150 bed spaces to support young people at risk of homelessness by December 2018.

RICS in the Americas used their volunteer days to tackle poverty and malnutrition in four major cities in the Americas (Toronto, New York, Washington DC and São Paulo).

The support the team supplied is equal to 136 volunteer hours, and over 4,000 meals prepared and served.

Europe At their gala dinner, RICS in the Netherlands raised a staggering €20,000 to support The SZN Foundation, a charity focused on eradicating youth homelessness across the country.

RICS in Germany raised €700 during their RICS Focus event.

Giving something back China

India

Working with the influential charity, Beijing Light Charity foundation, RICS China organised their first charity auction, raising 30,000 RMB.

The staff and student team at RICS School of Built Environment, Noida, are supporting a local construction community near the Noida campus.

These communities spring up during the construction phase of a site and are home to the construction workers and their families. These sites can last for 2-3 years and those living on them have no access to electricity, water, sanitation or education. The team have worked with the community to provide water and sanitation and 85 children from the site are now receiving tuition in maths, science and life skills from the RICS School of Built Environment students.

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IMAGE?

5,009 images

RICS’ record breaking challenge

We are delighted to announce that RICS is officially the GUINNESS WORLD RECORDSTM title holder for longest line of instant photographs.

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As part of our 150th anniversary celebrations, our employees at RICS wanted to mark this special year by doing something unique by setting a GUINNESS WORLD RECORDSTM title. It was very important that we reflected the depth and breadth of the surveying profession in this endeavour, so we set about taking over 5,000 instant photographs which illustrate what surveyors do. All around the world, employees got together to take images of the built and natural environment – reflecting the positive impact that the surveying profession makes to the world we live in. 5,009 instant images from around the world were taken, collated and pegged together at our London headquarters on Tuesday 18 September. A team from Malcolm Hollis measured the line and an official GUINNESS WORLD RECORDSTM adjudicator counted the images and verified the process.

Line measured

231.84 metres

Housed in our Penfold Box (created and named after our longest-serving Honorary Secretary John Wornham Penfold) the capsule contains: • a bottle of RICS 150th whisky • our annual report • confidence report

2068 – our 200th anniversary time capsule Our Patron, Her Majesty The Queen, sealed our 200th anniversary time capsule during her visit to RICS’ global headquarters on 20 November 2018.

• copy of the Red Book • letter to the CEO in 2068 from Sean Tompkins • letter to the President in 2068 from John Hughes • 150th anniversary pen • pen drive with all 150th campaign content

The time capsule will be opened on

1 January 2068

• crowdsourced content from the profession on what the world will look like in 2068 • Guinness World Record challenge photographs • World Built Environment Forum 2018 content • letter from current APC candidate to candidate in 2068 • letter from current student member to student member in 2068 • RICS – Building a Name book

Our 150th

Irene Barclay

in numbers

(first female chartered surveyor)

1 4 1,200 1 2 165 585 million GUINNESS WORLD RECORDSTM title

special 150 anniversary year films commissioned

Honorary Chartered Surveyor

royal visits

entries to the Cities for our Future competition

crowdsourced entries to our Pride in the Profession campaign

audience reach for our Cities for our Future campaign

®

A HISTORY OF RICS 1896

1868

Victorian Gothic Revival architect Alfred Waterhouse, who has also

1914

designed the Natural History Museum,

Railway mania grips the UK and huge suburbs sprout up around cities. With big money to

delivers his blueprint for a new home

be made, surveying suffers a ‘swarm of charlatans’, with anyone from wine merchants to

for the Institution. The Building

undertakers setting up shop. A new guarantee of professionalism is needed. So a group of

Committee love it, but request the

20 surveyors gather at the Westminster Palace Hotel to found the Institution of Surveyors.

addition of some lavatories.

World War I brings the Institution into service

as surveyors plot lines of trenches and

positions from the air.

1922 Irene Barclay becomes the first female chartered surveyor. She goes on to help the poorly housed and homeless as secretary

1881 The Royal Charter is granted by Queen Victoria. A Supplemental Charter is granted in 1921 by King George V, who becomes Patron – a tradition continued by every sitting monarch since.

of the St Pancras Housing Association in London.

1945 After World War 2, chartered surveyors take on the biggest job in the profession’s history: costing and valuing building works for hundreds of thousands of UK properties destroyed or damaged by bombing.

rics.org/150