Twenty years and still going strong: Hoist celebrates

The most enduring memory for me was watching the footballing World Cup and hoping that an England team containing several stars could make it all the way to the final.

Of course, at the time I was a teenage football fan and hadn’t yet realised that the English national team always end tournaments in either heroic failure or ignominious failure. England lost to Argentina in a penalty shoot-out, which at the time seemed to me to be a great injustice, rather than standard procedure.

Fast forward 20 years to 2018, and I’m now fully anticipating the England team to fail once again.

I’ll still be watching all their matches though—the excitement comes in finding out in what way they manage to crash out of the tournament.

June 1998 also saw the first issue of Hoist published, meaning that we are now celebrating our 20th anniversary issue.

Hoist was set up to complement the well-established Cranes Today, which now focuses on lifting equipment for the construction industry—the sort of large-scale crane seen across city skylines during building projects, which are then packed away and transported elsewhere at the end of the job.

Until 1998, we included all types of lifting in Cranes Today, despite the differences in the industrial and construction sectors. Hoist was designed to have a distinct focus on permanently-installed lifting equipment, suitable for use in warehouses, ports, and beyond.

The loads may often be lighter than in the construction industry, and the lift heights are almost always shorter, but the intense repeat use of hoists requires the equipment to have a set of qualities and capabilities different to construction cranes, but no less impressive.

In the intervening 20 years the magazine has grown and developed to ensure that Hoist offers coverage of lifting projects, installations, and new equipment from across the globe.

I’ve now been at the helm of Hoist for a year and a half, following a similar length of time as assistant editor on Cranes Today and, in the interim, overseeing World Construction Network.

I feel like I’ve learnt the ropes, if you’ll excuse the pun, so now it’s time to take the magazine further forward, into the next decade and beyond.

To that end, I would like to extend an open and ongoing invitation to all of our readers to contribute feedback in terms of what you like seeing in the magazine, what we can do more of, and what you’re less interested in.

Given the ongoing kerfuffle and confusion over GDPR over here in the UK, with many companies seemingly unsure as to who they can and can’t contact, I’d like to declare my email address and phone number officially open to all suggestions and feedback regarding Hoist, to help shape the next era of the magazine.

Daniel Searle, editor