Description

Bennerley Avenue is the £14m development of a new Specialist Care facility, together with inclusive communal amenities on the former Bennerley Ormiston Academy site in Ilkeston, Derbyshire. The project consists of a 40-bed specialist care wing and supporting accommodation, located in generous gardens. The building provides a café and hairdressers serving residents and the wider community. As a new and vibrant hub for the community, the project also includes a much-improved football pitch, in line with Sports England requirements, to provide the local area with a first-class community sporting facility. The project was funded by Derbyshire County Council, designed by Glancy Nicholls Architects, and constructed by Wates.

The 3-storey main building was constructed as a load bearing masonry construction with areas of steel transfer frame, built on an arrangement of trench fill and reinforced ground beam foundations.

The building comprises of 67 care bedrooms with communal lounge, activity and dining areas, within a large open plan environment, achieved by adopting the use of a steel transfer frame supporting bedrooms over.

The development is situated off Greenhill in Burcot, Bromsgrove and comprises a new 54-bedroom residential care home within the grounds of the existing Burcot Grange care home.

The new home has been designed to complement the existing accommodation for residents with specific care needs, including dementia patients. The building is a 2-storey load bearing masonry structure with localised steel transfer elements. The first-floor construction is formed of pre-cast concrete planks whilst the ground floor is formed from a combination of a ground bearing slab and a suspended beam and block floor system. The roof structure comprises sections of pitched roofs formed with timber trusses and sections of flat roof. The foundation solution is traditional mass concrete strip footings.

Facilities, including meeting rooms, training suites, a fully interactive lecture theatre and a cafe, will be available for the local community to use.

The college building includes various perimeter classrooms and meeting rooms with a double storey height central learning/break out space with a series of glazed Northlights to provide natural light throughout. The main oval lecture theatre with its copper seamed cladding forms a contrasting feature to the main entrance elevation.

The building form comprises of a steel frame with the floor slab and main roof areas being precast floor units. The foundation solution adopted traditional pad bases and strip footings however due to the site location and the presence of historic mine workings nominal reinforcement was included in the bottom of all foundations.

The construction is a two storey steel frame with precast floors. The external materials penetrate the inside of the building in order to truly reflect a solid element. A decision was made to separate the accommodation over two floors, which allowed for a much more compact floor plate, resulting in a larger area of natural landscaping to be retained around the project.

The building was delivered on a brown field city centre site with the construction being steel frame with insitu composite floors. The curved facades and split level roof presented a number of challenges for the structural design. The project required extensive ground modelling to minimise the volume of materials being exported from site, together with comprehensive ground engineering to allow a lime stabilized solution to be adopted in lieu of the vibro piling which had been detailed by the incumbent structural engineers. This enabled an increased ground pressure to be achieved, resulting in pad foundation sizes being reduced accordingly.

For further information regarding this project please contact Steve Wedge, Project Director.

The project has been delivered on a brown field site in Birmingham City Centre. The building comprises a six storey steel frame with clear span, column free floor plates at every level. The ground conditions were re-engineered to allow for traditional shallow foundations to be adopted.

The building is clad with Trespa rain screen cladding, featuring a glazed atrium which rises the full height of the building. The project incorporates numerous environmentally and sustainable technologies, achieving a BREEAM rating of Excellent.