A lot of British university estates have the same shape of problem sitting in the middle of them. A library or science block put up in a wave of expansion, with a big glazed atrium at its heart, and that atrium is now somewhere between twenty-five and forty years old. It

Marks on the metalwork of an atrium roof get dismissed as dirt for years. Someone notices a dark line running down a glazing bar, decides the cleaners have missed a bit, and the building carries on. Staining on framework is rarely dirt. It's a record of water that has been somewhere

The glass needs work and the reception desk is directly underneath it. That sentence describes most atrium repairs in commercial property, and it's the reason a job that looks like half a day on paper turns into a three-week programme. Nobody minds the work. What a building owner minds is the

Plenty of buildings have an atrium inspection on file. Far fewer have one worth reading. The weak version is a walk round the floor with a pair of binoculars and a photograph of the roof from below, written up as "no visible defects". It's not useless, exactly. It'll catch a cracked