Originally written by Timothy Adler on Small Business
Most of us think of homes being built with bricks or, at a push, timber, but Les Dawson of Uniblock doesn’t so much want to blow your house down as revolutionise the way you build it.
In many ways, Uniblock is a perfect good news story that chimes with Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to get more social housing built across the North of England and opening a factory in Scunthorpe, still reeling from the closure of British Steel.
Dawson, 56, also shows that you don’t have to be a bearded hipster living in Shoreditch to have a cutting-edge start-up idea. His Uniblock system slashes the amount of time it takes to put up the walls of a new home from six weeks to under a fortnight. Rather than painstakingly laying brick by brick, Uniblock uses concrete-filled sandwiches of high-density polystyrene, which is quicker and easier to build with and offering greater heat insulation.
>See also: What winning The Start-Up Series meant for me – Andy Roberts, Weekly10
Dawson spent 14 years in the Army having taken part in the Falklands War and then ran several businesses in Asia for 15 years before returning to