Mike Muir-Smith
Professional Career
Mike Muir-Smith is a chartered civil engineer and project manager with extensive experience in the design, planning, and execution of major civil engineering works, hotels, private housing, sports/leisure facilities and nursing/residential homes. Graduating from Cambridge University in 1965 with an honours degree in Mechanical Science and with a passion for rowing and sport in general, Mike Muir-Smith started his professional career as a Management Engineer with Costain Civil Engineering. He worked on the design, project management, and site management of major infrastructure projects in the UK, Dubai, Hong Kong and Seychelles, including motorway bridges, deep water ports, airports and tunnels. He is a member of the Institute of Civil Engineers.
Over the past three decades, Mike Muir-Smith has headed projects as diverse as marina development, boat design, boatbuilding, nursing homes, property development and hotels. Since 1992, he has been concentrating on the nursing and care home industry, luxury hotels, and the Cambridge Sport Lakes Trust.
Mike Muir-Smith believes an innovative approach to the design of a project is the key to success, and he always prepares the initial design of a project personally. Rather than following traditions or fashions, he starts each design with a blank sheet of paper and is always driven by the needs of the ultimate user. This approach has been central to the design of two current projects, the Cambridge Sport Lakes and the Raffles Praslin Resort.
The Raffles Praslin Seychelles resort is a current hotel project, an ultimate luxury resort and private villa complex with an overall construction cost in excess of US$150m, presently nearing completion and commissioning. Mike Muir-Smith found the site on the island of Praslin, Seychelles, was the initiator and concept designer of the overall project, executed the feasibility studies, and procured the introduction of partners Kingdom Hotel Investments to complete the financing package. He is a director of the holding company of the resort.
For the Cambridge Sport Lakes project, Mike Muir-Smith used his high-level experience as a Cambridge rowing Blue, international oarsman, Olympic coach, and continuing competitor on the Masters rowing circuit to inform his approach to its design. As Project Director of the then Cambridge Rowing Trust (a registered charity) in the early 90’s, Mike Muir-Smith was responsible for the location of a suitable site, the acquisition of the required land, the overall concept design, the engineering design, obtaining planning permission, and raising funds to finance the Trust’s operation. The resulting design will provide world-class training and competition facilities for six Olympic sports, together with a 230-acre landscaped Country Park with public access for recreation and country pursuits. The Park will contain a 3.2km (2-mile) long competition lake for the Olympic sports of rowing, canoeing, triathlon, and long-distance swimming, and an Olympic-standard BMX facility and cycle track.
On the design approach to this facility, Mike Muir-Smith comments:
“The design of rowing lakes has been stuck in a bind for over 40 years. Some artificial lakes are too frequently so rough that they are declared unfit for international racing, and all artificial competition lakes are prone to gross unfairness in a crosswind. I asked the obvious question: why not solve the wind problem?”
Following preliminary wind-tunnel tests, the unique design for the Cambridge Lake should minimise wind to the extent that it should be the first artificial lake in the world to be fair in all but the most severe conditions. This new lake and park will become not only an immense resource for the local community, but also a world centre of excellence in sport and the base for growing a large grass-roots sporting community.
The Trust's commitment to the local community is vitally important, as community support is crucial to the realisation of this project. As the present chairman of the Cambridge Sport Lakes Trust, Mike Muir-Smith believes passionately that the endemic problems of obesity, drug-taking and a lack of self-esteem, to name but a few, are best addressed by sport. This underpins the aspiration to create a world-class multi-disciplinary sports and recreation centre, and to mount a widespread sports outreach scheme in the surrounding region. If this goes as planned, the Trust will have a programme that will be comparable in scale to all the combined sports activities currently provided by Local Authorities in Cambridge.
For further information, view Mike Muir-Smith’s Sporting Career.