As a family led business Meersbrook was spearheaded by the grandfather George Leoyard Greaves, who changed the name from Meersbrook Concrete Company to Meersbrook Construction Company in 1987.

Over the past eight decades, the company has served all over Sheffield, catering fot the needs of both small and large organizations, making a name for itself in the local business community.

Its quality property and building renovation work has been the trademark of Meersbrook with a complete range of services including plastering, joinery, roofing and painting & decorating.

During the war years, Meersbrook was at the forefront of rebuilding Sheffield and its neighbouring areas. Transforming universities, commercial buildings, shops and restaurants from ruins into a great city once again. 

The company director Malcolm Greaves his father Bill Greaves and uncle Eric Greaves were all past presidents of the Federation of Master Builders.

Secret of the ice cream cone gate posts revealed!
MALCOLM Greaves is holding what looks like a giant Mr Whippy - the twirly whirly ice cream bit without the cone. Only it's made of concrete and weighs a ton.

"You can see these on gateposts all over Sheffield, particularly High Storrs. Sometimes they're chipped or broken," he says. "I drive by and think if they only knew who made them."
Only now it can be told! His firm did although so long ago that Malcolm, boss of Meersbrook Construction, who is 48, cannot remember them being made in his time.

"But we still have the mould," he says, taking the Diary to see a particularly fine pair of what he calls ice cream cones on the gateposts of his widowed mother Shirley's home in Gleadless Townend.
Meersbrook Construction is celebrating its 80th birthday and, as people and organisations tend to do, is looking back, to when grandfather George, the founder, wheeled his barrow with ladders to Shirecliffe to fix leaking roofs.

But he was also into concrete, hence the ice cream cones. The company has the only known mould but it might be a difficult job getting them to make another. "It takes a couple of days for the concrete to set and then you have to rub it down. A woman rang up for one once but when we quoted ?90 she didn't want to know," says Malcolm.

George - "these cones will last you a lifetime," he told Shirley when she moved in with her late husband Bill 49 years ago - also made Rockies, the concrete coping stones for garden walls.

Shirley also has these - her neat detached home bears witness to the excellence of Meersbrook concrete everywhere you look - but the mould for these has long gone.

The firm are general builders with joiners, plumbers, shopfitters, concreters, pebbledash renewers and electricians on their books but until 1987 were known as Meersbrook Concrete.
It was then they twigged the name stopped the message getting through that they did other things. "Ninety-nine per cent of our calls were for concreting," says Malcolm. So they changed it.
In a world of cowboy builders and fly-by-nights Meersbrook Construction, now based in Samson Street, are as solid as, well, concrete.

Take the woman who called them in for a roofing rescue job after she had employed a bunch of cowboys. She dug out an invoice from Meersbrook to repair gale damage to her roof back in 1962. It's a safe bet the job today cost more than the ?29 6s (?29.30) it did then.
Malcolm, third generation builder Greaves, is the current president of the Sheffield branch of the Federation of Master Builders.
After the Diary harangues him - quite unfairly - on the difficulty of getting tradesmen to turn up when they say.