Leisure, Retail and Commercial Projects
Our involvement with leisure projects has included working with sports associations relating to a new cricket pavilion, improving another, feasibility work in developing a new community sports complex and developing plans for new changing facilities for local football clubs.
Under retail and commercial projects we have upgraded or converted shops, created a covered shopping street and public square, inserted new facilities into a golf club, built a 40 bedroom extension to a hotel and brought it up to 5-star standard, created a pub and upgraded others, designed multi-storey car parks, and designed offices and restaurants.
Westgate Canopy, Halifax
“Architecturally, the Westgate Arcade is a delight. It is a major addition to the Halifax townscape which has the potential to reinvigorate the retail centre for the benefit of businesses, shoppers and visitors.”
Halifax Civic Trust
Halifax Civic Trust Award 2007
A town centre project involving the glazing of a street in Halifax by the creation of a self-supporting canopy (the Westgate Arcade) has recently won a local Civic Trust Award and is currently featured on the front page of Calderdale MBC Building Control’s folder distributed with all Building Regulations approval notices.
The project came about because the client was the owner of all properties on both sides of the 2 streets involved and wished to improve the retail experience and enhance the walking routes within the town. They had the determination to see through a complex series of negotiations: Calderdale Council (legal, planning, conservation and highways departments), English Heritage, bus and taxi companies, market traders, shopkeepers, Town Team, Town Centre Forum, Halifax Renaissance, Government House, Yorkshire Forward, gas water, electricity providers and cable providers.
The intention was to create a light and airy structure framing the vista across the valley to Beacon Hill beyond and providing weather protection for shoppers and visitors. The palette of steel and glass minimise the structure visually, the granite setts and York stone flags tie the streets to the surrounding areas of the town.
The surrounding buildings are of differing periods, types of construction and numbers of storeys and none could be relied on as load-bearing structures. The new structure would have to be self-supporting with light weight lean-to roofs connecting it to the individual shop facades. The central passageway was to be high enough to allow for the passage of emergency maintenance vehicles. The steel structure is designed to take aerial performance and to provide for hanging banners and displays.
Whilst this was a private development the Westgate project was partially financed by Yorkshire Forward and backed by Calderdale Council’s Regeneration Section.
The Works, Sowerby Bridge
“Altogether a good example of what can be done to bring a problem building, which seemed to have no obvious future, back to a highly successful commercial life…… Originally an engineering workshop dating back to the end of the nineteenth century, this basic interior has been treated simply but effectively by local architects Hawdon Russell. There is no artifice here, or any fake history, but merely a very individual, multi-functional building”.
CAMRA/English Heritage
CAMRA/English Heritage Conversion to Pub Use Award 2006
We were approached to look into the possibility of converting a former warehouse and joiners shop on a canal-side site into a pub, a micro-brewery and apartments. The scheme for the apartments was straightforward and these were built and occupied. The conversion of the former joiner’s workshop and warehouse had to be designed for stage completion and the pub element was completed with the micro-brewery yet to commence. The stages had to be such that the pub could fully function whilst allowing the other construction phases to continue. They have recently completed the new function suite.
Our philosophy was to keep all of the existing features of the building – its doors and windows, lofty interior, remnants of machinery, its surface materials, and use these to inform the shape and aesthetic of the new use.
The conversion into a pub won us the CAMRA/English Heritage Conversion to Pub Use Award 2006.