OUR HISTORY
In June 2025, Central Alliance hosted an Innovation Day, welcoming clients and suppliers to the historic National Coal Mining Museum. The day provided an opportunity to unveil our portfolio of innovative services, demonstrating how our three solutions can be applied to meet our clients needs. It was also an opportunity to showcase the new, forward-thinking Strategy for 2030.
Central Alliance wins the award for Ground Investigation Specialist of the Year at the Ground Engineering Awards for the second time. The award was won due to a clear diversification strategy, key collaboration with their client base to deliver logistically challenging projects and the best use of non-intrusive techniques which demonstrate clear health and safety benefits. All of these have helped the business grow year-on-year.
Central Alliance has established the Instrumentation & Monitoring department, streamlining our offerings to provide our clients with the most comprehensive range of supplier-agnostic instrumentation and monitoring solutions.
Find out more about our Instrumentation & Monitoring offerings.
Central Alliance establishes a new instrumentation brand, Sight Automation, to provide geotechnical, environmental, and structural remote monitoring, offering more sustainable monitoring solutions to its clients.
Find out more about Sight Automation.
Central Alliance expands into the mining sector, undertaking a second project in Australia. This proof of concept trial involves the dewatering and stabilisation of tailings storage facilities using Electrokinetic geosynthetics.
Find out more about Electrokinetic Dewatering.
Central Alliance delivers a long-awaited slope stabilisation trial for Network Rail, stabilising a railway embankment using Electrokinetic geosynthetics. The anodes and cathodes were installed using Central Alliance’s slope climbing rigs, leaving mature trees in place.
Find out more about our EKG Slope stabilisation system.
Central Alliance completes a slope stability appraisal for a highway in New South Wales, Australia, combining data sets, including satellite remote sensing data, and undertaking GIS analysis. This was delivered entirely remotely from our head office in Wakefield.
Central Alliance and Geoptic Infrastructure Investigations complete a series of muon tomography investigations of nine railway tunnels in the Wales and Western region. The technique offers significant health and safety, sustainability, and data quality benefits over more traditional investigation techniques such as intrusive drilling.
Central Alliance is awarded the Western monitoring contract for Network Rail, managing all new and existing geotechnical instrumentation in the Western region.
Central Alliance invests in specialist drilling rigs, taking an exciting delivery of two new specialist ground investigation rigs and a support unit. The new specialist plant includes a tracked 200 kN cone penetration testing (CPT) rig and a multi-purpose slope climbing rig, together with a slope climbing support unit.
Find out more about Cone Penetration Testing (CPT).
Following a long-standing relationship between the businesses, Central Alliance acquires specialist geotechnical consultancy Electrokinetic Limited, bringing innovative slope stabilisation and electrokinetic dewatering into the business.
Find out more about Electrokinetic.
Central Alliance invests in a bespoke helicopter pod to expand aerial survey services. The first project for the pod was a coastline LiDAR survey between Whitby and Skinningrove.
Find out more about our Aerial Surveying services.
The Central Alliance team bids and wins the first framework direct for Network Rail on behalf of RSK Environment—the Wales and Western Survey Services Framework.
Central Alliance jointly wins the Team of the Year award with ASTERRA and National Highways at the New Civil Engineer Techfest Awards for an innovative remote sensing project.
Central Alliance wins the coveted Ground Investigation Specialist of the Year award at the tenth anniversary Ground Engineering Awards.
After reading a BBC article on the discovery of a previously unknown chamber in the Great Pyramid, Egypt, the Central Alliance Applied Technologies team researched and then introduced the same technique for infrastructure applications by collaborating with a university consortium, successfully completing a proof of concept trial at Alfreton Old Tunnel, searching for hidden former construction shafts in the disused railway tunnel.
Find out more about Muon Tomography.
Leading environmental and engineering services company RSK Group Ltd announces that it has acquired Central Alliance.
Find out more about RSK Group.
Central Alliance established the Applied Technologies department with the purpose of undertaking research and development and introducing new survey and investigation techniques into the business.
Find out more about the services our Applied Technologies department provide.
Central Alliance reacts to a large landslide at Harbury Cutting to rapidly acquire data for a failing cutting slope, delivering ground investigation, instrumentation and monitoring, aerial surveys, and dewatering. The business went on to become a restricted access and slope investigation specialist, later working on Eden Brows, Farnley Haugh, Loch Eilt, and Stonehaven landslides and Lime Street Station's retaining wall collapse.
Central Alliance invests in unique slope climbing drilling rigs and the first mobile mapping system of its kind in the UK, pushing the business to the forefront of restricted access investigations and surveys.
Central Alliance relocates the head office to a larger office in Wakefield to accommodate the expanding business.
Central Alliance diversifies by establishing a survey and geomatics team to complement the ground investigation department and provide a fuller pre-construction service offering. The business embarked on a period of rapid growth.
Find out more about our Survey & Geomatics services.
The business acquires its first rotary rig, a new Massenza Mi5. The rig was sourced and acquired in less than a week to deliver an urgent contract when a hired rig became unavailable.
The first overseas contract was won and delivered in Norway—ground investigations for new distribution centres. The business’s first dynamic sampling rig was taken by van, via ferry, to Denmark, then driven through Denmark and via a second ferry to Oslo.
Central Alliance wins its first contract worth over £100,000: to sample coal stocks at nine power station sites using a hollow stem auger system.
The business diversifies, acquiring the first cable percussion drilling rig to work alongside the dynamic sampling rigs. A second dynamic sampling rig was acquired in the same year.
The first rail projects were won in the London North East region (now Eastern), leading to a 7-year programme of work investigating voided structures (viaducts) through the track bed during nighttime possessions.
The first employee starts working for the business alongside the founder.
The business is established in the UK under the previous name of Drift Ground Investigation as a one-person business with one small drilling rig, undertaking ground investigations. The business initially worked for consultants and other ground investigation contractors across all sectors.