Woman on top of the world: the M&S leading lady who helped build the Shard

M&S’s latest leading lady is also a structural engineer who helped build the Shard. Roma Agrawal talks to Susannah Butter about being a role model and why London needs more high rises
p34 edition 3103 MUST CREDIT: Rebecca Reid Engineer Roma Agrawal photographed at the Shard 27 March 2014. Ph: Rebecca Reid
31 March 2014

When people ask Roma Agrawal what her job is, they are often surprised. “You’re too pretty to be an engineer,” is one response, as well as “Don’t you mean you’re an architect?” She tells me she’s decided to take these comments as a compliment. “Non-engineers have a particular idea of what we should look like, a preconception about old white males or geeks, but I think they mean comments such as that as admiring.”

Agrawal and I are at the Hutong restaurant on the 33rd floor of the Shard, a building which she played a crucial role in creating. “Yeah, I built it with my own hand,” she jokes.

This softly spoken 30-year-old in a yellow dress is the woman who made sure the biggest erection in Western Europe didn’t fall down. In her role as a structural engineer for WSP Group she spent six years working on it, designing the foundations and making the distinctive top. “The spire is my baby. Buildings usually get covered with plaster but that spire is so honest. It stands up with every nut and bolt on show. You can tell the engineers at the viewing platform because they’re the ones looking up at the structure rather than down at London.”

She did all this despite being “not good with heights”. “I kept telling myself I couldn’t cry on site. It would be far too embarrassing. Now I can stand at the edge near the window, which I wouldn’t have been able to do six years ago. When you push yourself you sometimes enjoy it.”

From the window Agrawal points out her next project, the transformation of London Bridge. It’s the biggest station rebuild that National Rail has ever done. “There will be some disruption but ultimately it will make travel easier and improve lives,” she tells me. In her work, Agrawal makes sure Londoners have places to live, work and get around. But as a female engineer she is in a minority. “Sadly, only eight per cent of engineers in the UK are women”. It is Agrawal’s mission to increase this to at least 30 per cent.

That’s where her new gig, as a model, comes in. M&S chose her to be in their Leading Ladies campaign photographed by Annie Leibovitz, which launches today with a cast including Rita Ora, Annie Lennox and Doreen Lawrence.

Making the campaign was “completely surreal” . “Annie Leibovitz wiping mud off my boot was not something I expected to happen in my life. I was the most starstruck with Annie Lennox and Emma Thompson.”

Model Alek Wek, who was also on the shoot, has a niece who is studying engineering at Cambridge and Agrawal has invited her to see her office.

“I loved that they had models and music stars alongside Doreen Lawrence and an engineer. It’s fantastic that M&S is reaching out to a whole new audience who might not have considered engineering before. It’s good for girls, and boys, to see engineers of all shapes, sizes and types doing amazing things, because anyone can do it. Even if you don’t like maths and physics.”

Agrawal is “slightly intimidated and embarrassed” by her new status as a role model — “but I have to stop thinking that way,” she says. “I love talking to people about engineering. Sitting in the Shard today I can say I played a role in making it. I’ll be standing on London Bridge, watching people look at the building and it’s the most rewarding thing, or I’ll be in a part of London I don’t know and see it. You realise you’ve built something that’s changed London’s skyline and that’s an unbeatable feeling. And to get there you’ve used creativity, problem solving skills, worked in teams, in cool places.”

Yet engineering is facing “a branding problem”. “I met a girl the other day and she thought we fix toilets. Most people hear the word ‘engineering’ when they’re on the Tube and there are works but none of this would be here if the engineers hadn’t made it in the first place. We’re changing lives, and it’s scientists and engineers who are going to solve the world’s energy problems, reducing the amount of power needed and energy released in buildings. The industry is booming, my company is hiring 600 people this year and it’s well paid.”

Agrawal lives in West Hampstead with her investment banker husband but spent the first six years of her life in Ithaca, “a snowy small town outside New York”, before moving to Mumbai, where she grew up.

Growing up in India she was unaware that female engineers were anything remarkable. While her electrical engineer father worked in the family business, her mother was a computer programmer, “which I enjoy telling people”, and her sister is now an architect. “There’s less of a divide between girls’ and boys’ subjects in India than here. It’s normal there for girls to study science.

“I didn’t realise that a gender divide existed until I came to university at Oxford. I looked around the lecture theatre and there were about 10 girls in a class of 150. That’s when I thought this was kind of weird. We are designing things for society and if the people designing them only represent a small proportion of society we probably can’t deliver well.”

Her company, WSP, is going some way to redressing the gender imbalance. “Our intake is nearly 30 per cent female and in my team we’ve just had our first female director for structures. She has two grown-up kids, worked flexibly and marched on. Engineering is compatible with having children, for men too.”

On site, though, she is often the only woman. “I get interesting reactions. People offer to help me up ladders and I definitely stand out. But it’s an advantage, they remember you. How many colleagues who also worked on the Shard have been on an M&S shoot?”

When the Shard was finished, Agrawal had “a sad withdrawal phase”. So what does she think about London’s skyline being eaten up by these towering buildings? “Change is good. London’s a very exciting place to be, with lots of shapes on its skyline. And it’s exciting to build in because everywhere you touch there’s a train station, or historical structures from the Roman times. You’ve got so much history and culture, then you’re coming in trying to change something. The view gives a new perspective on a major world city.”

She is all for the city growing vertically. “One of the big things we need to solve is the housing situation in London. A way to do that is more well-designed high-rises. Culturally, we need to accept that. Living in a high-rise can be fantastic. Everyone’s got their own views on how to develop the city but at the end of the day people are going to want to live and work here and we need to provide a situation where they aren’t commuting for two hours to get in.”

But the Shard is more seven-star, Qatari-owned luxury than housing solution. “I wasn’t directly involved with the Qataris. We live in a global city and investment is going to come from everywhere.

“It can only do us good. The reason the Shard was built in a recession is we put in the graft before it started then got foreign investment and were able to finish it. I can’t see it as a bad thing.”

As I leave the building I find my eyes drawn away from the panoramic view of London to the structure of this extraordinary landmark Agrawal gave the city. M&S is lucky to have her.

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