Abstract:
The format, organization and style of this edition are the same as those of the previous editions. The
justification is that those features have shown themselves to be successful by the fact that sales have
continued to be strong right up to the year 2011. The total sales in English, as well as in the 12 languages
into which this book has been translated, exceed half-a-million copies over a period of nearly half-acentury.
With the passage of time, standards evolve, become modified, withdrawn and replaced. This produces
a need for updating a technical book such as Properties of Concrete and can be accommodated by minor
changes in new impressions of an existing edition, as was done in the 14 impressions of the fourth edition,
which I intended to be final. This is still the case with American standards, where ASTM has a strict
policy of periodic reviews, confirmation or replacement.
On the other hand, the situation of the British standards is far more complex. Specifically, there exist
now some new British standards, described as also European standards, denoted by BS EN. There
continue to be in force some traditional British standards, denoted by BS. In some cases, the British
standards are described as obsolete, obsolescent, and also as ‘current, superseded’. All this is highly
confusing but is perhaps an inevitable consequence of a piecemeal introduction of new standards, which
do not simply replace the old ones on a one-to-one basis. There is a well-known saying that a camel is a
horse designed by a committee. The European standards are designed by an international committee!
I have retained by way of tables and limits information contained in a number of the old British
standards, even those that have been withdrawn, because they contribute to knowledge of what is
desirable in the understanding of a relevant property. I believe that such an approach is valuable in a
scientific book, encyclopaedic in character. This is especially so because a number of the new BS EN
standards lay down how to measure some property of concrete and then to ‘declare’ the outcome but say
nothing about the interpretation of the result. Such an approach does not contribute to knowledge of wh
