Kent Wilkins works long hours, alone, in the dead of night in icy conditions. We meet him as he scatters salt by hand in a freezing car parkKent Wilkins inches his pickup truck into the middle of the car park, switches off the engine and turns to face me. "Once you've arrived on site, the first thing you have to do is turn your vehicle off," he explains. "That sends a ping to the guys at the office, which means we can prove to the clients that we've been here."I nod solemnly as he pulls out a touchscreen device and taps a button on the screen. "Confirm job arrival," he murmurs to himself. From somewhere inside the cab comes a weak bleeping noise. Satisfied, Wilkins takes this as his cue to get out and so I follow suit.It's seven o'clock on a Friday night in Staines and the temperature is already well below zero. At Rourke House, a small redbrick office development, the windows are dark and the car park deserted, save for Wilkins and myself.White crystals crunch satisfyingly beneath the soles of our boots as we inspect the ground, walking in small circles like curious penguins. The granules are not snow, or even ice, but salt. "There's been a good four or five nights of salt put down here," he says, "so let's have a look around and see where it leads us."The only place it seems to lead us, in this freezing car park, however, is to yet more salt. For a gritter like Wilkins, I am noticing, this is something of a bittersweet conundrum. Because, while it proves his team has performed its duties well, it also denies him the opportunity to scatter any more salt on the ground.It is an impressively crunchy covering, I remark, trying to cheer him up."Yes," he admits, sighing a little. "It's actually quite hard not to put too much salt down." Then, to the relief of both of us, he finds a bald patch and perks up. "As you can see, there's not as much here as there might be," he says, striding purposefully back to the truck for a bucket and shovel.This is Wilkins' fourth winter of working for GritIt, a business that de-ices the car parks and thoroughfares of private offices, retail parks and other off-street locations. Since joining, he has risen to the rank of assistant area manager and is now responsible for a team of 10 men who grit up to 15 sites a night across a region stretching from west London and the M4 corridor down to the south coast. "We'll get in touch with our guys on the day," he says. "If it's cold, they're out. If it's not cold, they get the night off."Wilkins spends much of his evenings making site inspections of his team's work, meeting up with them to discuss their workload or quality issues and, if necessary, getting stuck in himself. An element of unpredictability is injected into the schedule by calls to attend emergency leaks for Thames Water, of which, he says, there are around 600-700 a night. "We have a lot of drivers that go out to those and make the jobs safe, grit around the leaks."In the back of the truck is just under a tonne of what he describes as "pure marine salt, from sustainable resources" – which, I can't help thinking, makes it sound like they should be selling it in the supermarket rather than chucking it on the pavements.Much of the salt spreading is done by hand but for larger areas, a spinning device hooked on the rear of the truck can scatter it across an adjustable wide trajectory.It's the end of a week of very cold but very arid weather, which explains the preponderance of salt on the ground; his team have been here for five consecutive nights without much cause to bend their backs.But Wilkins knows the real fun will start in a couple of days, when snow is forecast, and the likely freeze-thaw conditions after that: "On a good night, when it's cold and dry, we can be finished by 2am. When it's snowing, it could be any time, really."Having duly retrieved supplies, Wilkins swooshes large scoopfuls of salt across the ground with remarkable dexterity. "Probably something I know a little bit about by now," he observes wryly. Then he gets his touchscreen device out again and beckons me over."I've painstakingly, over a few days, got photos of all my guys' sites on here," he says, zooming in on an aerial photograph of the car park bordered by bright yellow lines. Each site, he explains, has something called a "geofence" surrounding it. "It's an area around the buildings, so the tracking system can pick us up."There's something impressive about the pride Wilkins clearly takes in his work but, even so, this James Bond-style approach to gritting is making me mildly anxious. If a gritting company is deploying this kind of deep-level surveillance technology, who else might be monitoring my movements? "This took me quite a long time," he goes on, homing in on a tiny nook on the satellite photograph. "Look, they could miss this footpath here and someone could slip on it and we'd be responsible. It's very important."A New Zealander by birth and still very much in spirit – even the satnav in his truck pipes out directions in a clipped Kiwi accent – Wilkins has lived and worked in the UK for 10 years, having first arrived as a backpacker."I got to about 25 and decided to come over for my big OE, as they call it in New Zealand – my Overseas Experience," he recalls.An ancestral visa, thanks to his Scottish grandmother, helped smooth the ground, as did his background as a qualified carpenter which ensured him a regular supply of work. "And then I stayed and I got residency, and I just sort of carried on."In that time he met and married his South African wife, Karryn, and settled in south-west London with their two young children. Like many Antipodeans, he feels drawn to the cultural richness and relative proximity of Europe, although like many Britons he struggles to quite make the best of it all. "I still can't call the UK home, I'm very patriotic," he admits, sighing when I ask if he ever yearns to go back to New Zealand."But I like the idea of hopping on a plane and getting over to Europe in a couple of hours. You can hop over to France for the morning. I'd like to see a lot more of Europe, but once the kids come along, it gets a bit trickier …"Wilkins is contracted to GritIt from November to mid April during which time, particularly if the weather is treacherous, he hardly sees his young family for days on end. For the rest of the year, he partners up with a plumber friend and the pair mainly fit kitchens and bathrooms."The plumber is very good at letting me go in the winter, he mainly does heating maintenance then, so it suits both of us, really," he explains.Despite the long hours, he admits regular winter gritting work is a decent alternative to the cold, wet and unpredictability of building site carpentry at this time of year. Also welcome are the surprisingly generous wages which are calculated per site worked, rather than by the hour.In a particularly cold winter he reckons that can stack up to as much as £25,000 for six months' work, though admittedly the shifts are antisocial and days off can be irregular. "It's good for me to have the umbrella of security," he says. "We are all self-employed but the company looks after us as though we are full-time staff. It's a good model."We continue our inspection of the office car park and Wilkins points out a pile of cigarette butts on the floor, a telltale sign for the seasoned gritter that a stretch of pavement might require attention."See this corner? Someone could slip here," he says, making an exaggerated slipping motion with one leg. "We don't want any smokers dying early."Happily, for one who largely works outdoors, alone, in the pitch dark, he has managed to stay out of trouble, other than being a witness to the odd skirmish outside a pub at closing time. "There does feel like an element of you being out in the middle of the night and not knowing what yahoos are out there," he admits. "But if you're on site, you just drive away. There's always someone on the end of the line to call the police, or whatever."With our site inspection concluded and smokers' corner duly resalted, it is time for Wilkins to ping out of the geofield once more to GritIt headquarters, which I'm reassured to find is based in Uxbridge, as opposed to inside a secret island volcano or a space station.Even so, in this curious nocturnal domain of freezing, salty car parks, I wonder if it ever feels strange to be so far at odds with the rest of the working world?"I just think it's a very important job because slips, trips and falls are a major health and safety issue," Wilkins says simply. "I like that idea that we're the guardian angels of the night that keep people safe in the winter."Work & careersWeatherGraham Snowdonguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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