Golden Trowel Awards 2013

Maybe because it is a niche industry, we rarely get to feature news from the Pattern Imprinted Concrete sector of our trade. For all sorts of reasons, most of the news about PIC tends to be negative because the apparent simplicity of the system and the profit margins tend to attract the wrong sort of people into setting up in the business.

Over the years one supplier in particular has made a real effort to improve the professionalism and the perception of the PIC trade and move it away from the pillocks who reckon any fault from full-width cracking to backfalling to flaking can be rectified with just another coat of cheap sealant.

There's only so much that can be done to educate the Pattern Imprint buying public about what to avoid when selecting a contractor , but one method of showcasing the trade and promoting those contractors with genuine skills is to organise a ' best work' competition, which is exactly what PICS based in Newbury with depots in Manchester and Sheffield, have been doing for the last few years.

Rightly or wrongly, this website gets a disproportionate number of complaints about Pattern Imprinted Concrete, which is mainly due to bad contractors rather than bad product, so when there's an opportunity to sing the praises of those with genuine skills, it helps redress the balance somewhat and, hopefully, will convince the potential purchasers in Britain and Ireland that there are indeed good contractors out there, and here are just a few of them.

John Grant, Sales Manager at PICS, takes up the story...

Firstly, a massive thank you to everyone who submitted entries for the 2013 Golden Trowel Competition. By far our biggest entry, we received over 550 individual photographs this year so there was plenty for our esteemed judges to look at! Entries have come from installers, large and small, from all over the UK but also as far afield as the Czech Republic, Holland and Ireland. The judges from The Concrete Society were hugely impressed and encouraged by the tremendous scope and variety of the design options on display.

We have put together two hugely impressive montages of some of the best photos from this year's competition. Please do click on the YouTube links below as there's some mightily impressive work showcased there:

YouTube - Golden Trowel 2013 Montage - Decorative Concrete

YouTube - Golden Trowel 2013 Montage - Wallcrete

So, onto The Winners!

PICS are pleased to announce the winners of the 2013 Golden Trowel Competition, as selected by the judging panel which consisted of members of the Concrete Society, representatives from Hope Construction Materials and decorative concrete installers who have previously entered the competition. The standard was exceptional this year so there was much debate, but these were eventually selected as the Top Three in each category: