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“We wanted somewhere with history, and this site dates back to 903”


wanted to do it how Bombay Sapphire would do it.”


How did you find the site? Will Brix, Bombay Sapphire: “A man called John Burke, who used to be the Bombay Sapphire category director for Bacardi, lived in a nearby village. One day, he had a pint with the care- taker, who’s been looking after Laverstoke Mill for 35 years. When the caretaker heard John was looking for a site, he told him about it. There was hoarding all along the front of the site, and no one had been in since 2000 apart from copper thieves. John Burke jumped the fence and had a look round, then got us all to come and look. We quickly realised it was the site for us. We were so convinced, we bought it without planning permission.”


Eliot Postma, Heatherwick Studio: “The moment you visit the site you fall in love with it. It’s an unusual, unique place.”


What was it like when you took over? Eliot Postma, Heatherwick Studio: “There were 49 buildings on the site, dating from the late 1850s through to the 1960s and 1970s. The original early 20th-century structures had been built on with additions like lean-to buildings – they were almost like barnacles stuck to the side of the hand- some Victorian buildings. Overall it was a confused cluster and it was quite difficult to understand where you were. Essentially it felt like being in a maze.”


What were you looking for from the site? Will Brix, Bombay Sapphire: ”We wanted a site which was suitable for redevelopment and somewhere with history. Our preference was to repurpose or bring a property back to life rather than to build


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hydroelectric innovation in the UK, so we also reconditioned an open flume Francis turbine we found on the site and it’s generating electricity for us.”


The site was cluttered and confusing


afresh. This site – which dates back to 903 – met all those criteria. We got inspiration from the Campaign for the


Protection of Rural England and – like them – we believe the English countryside is a finite resource that needs to be preserved. With this project, we’ve been able to achieve all our commercial aspirations, as well as restoring an important piece of English heritage.”


How did you approach the redevelopment? Eliot Postma, Heatherwick Studio: “Our first move was to clear away the pre-fab buildings to reveal the Victorian charm. In doing that, we brought life back to the stretch of the River Test which runs right through the site. It’s an exceptionally beautiful chalk stream with the clearest water I’ve ever seen in the UK. But it was unloved, with high con- crete sides and buildings obstructing the water. Once we’d cleared the river, we used the direction of its flow as an organisational reference point to determine the direction of the visitor flow through the attraction.”


What role did the river play? Will Brix, Bombay Sapphire: “Heatherwick Studio championed the river from day one. It’s a complicated site, so it was used as a navigational feature. This mill was at the forefront of pioneering


What was the next stage? Eliot Postma, Heatherwick Studio: “The next stage was deciding where the factory buildings should be – they had to be big enough to house the huge stills – and then after that, creating a heart to the site with the visitor centre and the glass houses to


enable the public to immerse themselves in the story of Bombay Sapphire.”


Why did you make the visitor centre central to the experience? Will Brix, Bombay Sapphire: “The entire development was designed from scratch with that in mind. We wanted it to be a journey of discovery rather than a didactic museum experience. ”


Tell us about the glasshouses Eliot Postma, Heatherwick Studio: “One of the lovely things about Bombay Sapphire is the crazy lengths they go to source their botanicals, from India, China, Spain... We loved that part of their story. A quirk of the distillation process is that


it produces a huge amount of excess heat. These two things came together. We saw the opportunity to create a couple of greenhouses that could use the excess energy to grow specimens of the botanicals that go into the gin. So, we created two glass houses, a tropical one and a Mediterranean one, along- side the stills right in the heart of the site.”


Tell us about their design? Eliot Postma, Heatherwick Studio: “The UK has an amazing Victorian heritage of glass engineering, from glasshouses – such


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