Immediate Past President, ladies and gentlemen, members and guests of the Institution, it is both a great honour and a great pleasure to take office as President: when I started out on my professional career, it would have been inconceivable to imagine that, 30 years after graduation, I would have been elected to lead my chosen profession. I say this without any false modesty, and I have no doubts at all that the same sentiments would apply to any of my predecessors. It is doubly exciting for me to serve over the Millennium, not because of the symbolic significance of the date itself, but because of the large number of high quality, exciting projects that are being constructed or completed at this time which, I believe, will add significantly to the public perception of structural engineering (Fig 1).
J.R. Roberts
I had decided more than a year ago to focus some of my