RON GODFREY visits the professional practice which for decades has been turning the visions of a changing York into reality.

FOR an organisation which has changed the North Yorkshire skyline for 57 years, the Dossor Group is strangely unsung. Its excellence is accepted, almost expected.

Even James Taylor, senior partner of this well-established consulting engineers and surveyors practice, seemed to merge into the crowd at this month's long-awaited opening of the £4.2m Millennium bridge in York

The affable Mr Taylor is at pains to point out that Dossor played but a team role in the creation of this 280-tonne sweep of elegance.

As an engineer he metaphorically linked arms with Prof Patrick Nuttgens, the architectural historian, and Andrew Harland, the landscape architect from Peterborough, to investigate all eight design proposals for the bridge.

While the official choice wasn't down to him, it was the one he recommended.

You'd run out of breath trying to list where the Dossor Group has made a difference - from shoring up underground space at the Jorvik Centre, and revamping the Crown Court in the Eye of York, to masterminding the structural designs of the York Business Park and extensions at Nestl Rowntree. It was responsible for the strategic design of highways and drainage for the huge North York Trading Estate at Clifton Moor.

From its headquarters, a mid-Victorian manor house at West Huntington Hall, the practice has helped to turn thousands of commercial, industrial and aesthetic dreams into real structures and landscapes.

Recent work has included Heslington Hall and the physics building at York University, landscaping advice at Rievaulx Abbey visitor centre and civil, structural, mechanical and electrical work at Rowntree Park.

Mr Taylor estimates that since the Dossor Group began in 1944, it has been involved in the creation of one structure in three between York Minster and the Ouse.

Today his 25 engineers and administrators handle no fewer than 600 projects at any one time, about 80 per cent commissioned by repeat clients. It all adds up to about £1 million in fees per year.

These are good times, but this as of this week Mr Taylor, 57, has been at Dossor 33 years - long enough ago to know that the practice is sensitive to the changing economy.

For the moment there is little indication that while the good times are rolling they are spinning towards a cliff.

The Dossor Group has been asked to produce reports and preliminary designs for a possible future science park on York's outskirts, where the role of green belt land is still being considered.

Soon the group will be called on to design an internal access system within the Clifford's Tower monument for English Heritage for whom it is already conducting fire audits throughout the North of England.

Still, Mr Taylor remains cautious...and ready. "The future is difficult. Everything nowadays is very competitive and the marketplace can still change quickly.

"But we are principally alert and inventive and our enormous commitment means that we have the ability to change fast with it.

''That's why we've survived and succeeded for so long. We don't blow our trumpet about it. Perhaps we should."