PROJECT REPORT: SPORTS & LEISURE FACILITIES
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each entrance leads you first to the intended destination. The south entrance leads into the octagon, where visitors can pick up their towels and flip flops, and book in for a massage or treatment. The new entrance built on the west side, which is next to King’s Meadow Road, is where the meeting rooms and kitchens were constructed, with the entrance taking you first to a reception, and then to the bar and restaurant. Beyond that, you can connect into the spa or the pool area, and vice versa. “Basically,” says Kendon, “with the doughnut plan you can walk all the way around the pool either outside or inside, so you can get from anywhere in the building to anywhere else with ease.” A lean-to corridor runs aside the restaurant. “The restaurant is long and thin, and so it’s actually a big advantage to have a corridor along the back of it, which means that you can service the restaurant without barging through the tables too much,” explains Kendon.
One of the largest structural alterations was digging a new basement. The ground underneath the site is gravel capped with clay and, as a result of being so near the river, there is a large amount of water in the
ADF JULY 2018
gravel. Kendon says, “As soon as you dig a hole, it fills up instantly.” To counteract this, a dewatering process was undertaken, which, while expensive and complicated, worked successfully. “After that, it was pretty plain sailing.” He says the restaurant is “an ordinary two storey brick and block building with steel beams and a timber roof, nothing terribly complicated.”
Restoration
In order to retain the building’s historic although dilapidated character, as much as possible of the building fabric was either preserved, or replaced ‘like for like.’ “We decided pretty early on that we would keep as much of it as we could,” said Kendon. With the building being listed, this was popular with the planning department’s conservation officers.
He details the practicalities of the refurbishment process, saying the contractors had to remove a “hell of a lot of rotten fabric,” while repairing what they could of the existing. “We took off the roofs and chopped out huge swathes of rotten roof trusses and brickwork, pulled out bushes, and then re-roofed it
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HYDROLOGICAL
The scheme incorporates a vast water tank to store rainwater, saving on water bills
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