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© John Kees, Shepherd Construction
the air-conditioned, artificial lighting type of environment.” The 55,000 sq m Trinity Walk is built on a 12-hectare site in
the heart of Wakefield, incorporating over 40 stores, including big names such as H&M and Next and anchored by Debenhams and Sainsbury’s. The 8,900 sq m Debenhams is the city’s first modern department store, and the levels of Trinity Walk have enabled it to sit on top of the superstore, so that Sainsbury’s cus- tomers can easily nip upstairs for access to Debenhams and other major high street retailers. The centre was constructed with steel frames and concrete floors,
accommodating units ranging from the 9,300 sq m Sainsbury’s to small kiosks. A variety of exterior cladding is featured in the scheme, including terracotta, render, big-screen panels, brickwork, stonework, Aster Stone quartz tiles and Kingspan insulated panels. Kingspan is used on the Debenhams frontage, while its other
elevations have pitch-faced stone and a section that evokes Wakefield’s industrial past, with bands of dark cladding repre- senting coal seams.
“The majority of the site was a gasworks going back to
Victorian times,” Sargeant points out. “As part of the scheme, there was a lot of work done in removing old tar pits, traditional gas holders. This part of Wakefield was not very pretty, and now it’s had a complete transformation. “We had to do some major road diversion works, including
knocking down a multi-storey car park that Shepherd built in the mid-Seventies. We’re always intrigued when we get the job of knocking down things we’ve built!” In the new centre there are 1,000 car parking spaces with
direct access from the A61 inner city ring road, and the site is directly opposite the central bus station and the new £3 million market hall, linked to the shopping centre by walkways. “One of the first things we did was build a new indoor market
for Wakefield,” says Sargeant, “mainly because the previous mar- ket was right in the middle of our site! “We built a major new market for Wakefield Council, and it complements Trinity Walk by housing small traditional inde-
Steel frame is lifted into position
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