Graham has been appointed by Oxfordshire County Council to build the Didcot to Culham River Crossing, the final construction contract to be let under the council's £332m Housing Infrastructure Fund (HIF1) programme for Didcot and the surrounding area. The appointment was confirmed in early August.

The job itself is a 3.6km single-carriageway road linking the A4130 at Collett roundabout in Didcot with the A415 at Culham, including new bridges over the Appleford railway sidings and the River Thames, plus segregated walking and cycling routes. The council says the crossing is designed to take pressure off existing routes through Sutton Courtenay, Culham and Clifton Hampden, roads that have long been vulnerable to congestion and winter flooding. VolkerFitzpatrick and Aecom already hold other contracts on the same programme, and main construction on Graham's package is expected to run for around two and a half years.

Why it matters for the market

HIF1 was approved back in 2024 with £332.5m of programme funding plus a further £79.6m contingency from Homes England, and enabling works such as site clearance, archaeology and utility diversions have been under way since earlier this year. Graham's appointment is the last piece of that procurement puzzle falling into place, which means the whole Didcot programme now has its delivery contractors locked in across every major package. For a fund-backed scheme that has been years in the planning, that is the point where budgets, programmes and resourcing stop being theoretical.

It is also a reminder that HIF-funded infrastructure, unlike some council-led schemes, comes with committed multi-year funding attached, which gives contractors and their supply chains more confidence to commit people and plant than they would to a scheme still chasing funding approval.

What it means for your career

A 2.5-year civils and structures programme of this size needs a full site team: a project manager and senior engineers to run the bridge and road works, a site-based QS to manage the interface between four separate contractors on one programme, and environmental and consents specialists given the Thames crossing and flood-risk considerations. Anyone with a mixed roads-and-structures background in the Thames Valley or wider Oxfordshire area should treat this as a live lead, and it is worth approaching Graham's civils division directly rather than waiting for the roles to appear on job boards, since mobilisation on schemes like this tends to happen through existing networks first.

More broadly, HIF-funded programmes are a useful category to track if you want visibility of committed, funded work rather than schemes still waiting on a business case. With this one now fully let, the next question for anyone in the region is which HIF2 or successor scheme is moving through approval behind it.