Avon River Climbing Centre

Paul Twomey @ TCA

• Architects

One of the UK's first purpose built climbing centres, this multi award winning project has been celebrated as a civic leader in place creation, reinvigorating a little used part of this rural market town.

Designed as a series of escalating volumes it holds a range of high level climbing facilities while reducing the visual mass within the landscape conservation area. It is designed to increase the volume of the floodplain on which it sits while remain ing safe in even the most severe of future flood scenarios.

The brief was to improve an area of disused sports fields which were prone to flooding. The client was a local charity with a desire to bring significant benefit to the local town which had long missed out on investment. The brief was built by the local population through a series of community engagement meetings each seeking out key stake holders and offering up alternative visions for the area of land.

The building is highly insulated and uses local materials to minimise embodied energy.
MVHR and Photovoltaics ensure minimal energy demand.
Low water taps, wc’s and showers etc we specified to reduce potable water usage.
Local timber used for majority of cladding and enclosure
Biodiversity improvements including elements of re-wilding and wildflower meadows, flowering and fruiting trees, bee posts, circa 20 bird and bat boxes, the retention of existing trees and the planting of hundreds more.
Limited parking and improved cycle/footpath access to minimise car usage.
Recycling areas
EV and EB charge points
Low energy lighting and Air Handling Units.

Sitting on a flood plain, we needed to not only ensure the building and its users were safe in the case of high water levels but also to ensure that the site could hold more water after we undertook the work to protect properties downstream. The building itself is lifted 1.5m into the air on stilts and large compensatory volumes were excavated.

photo_credit Paul Twomey @ TCA — Paul Twomey @ TCA

The extremely small number of centres previously built from scratch meant we had to research internationally to find the information needed to balance to requirements of energy usage while accounting for chalk dust, which is extremely light and had to be considered at every step of the design and build process to ensure longevity of air handling and fire detection through easy access to filters etc.

As one of the first purpose built climbing centres in the UK it was funded by a local charity with support from Sports England and Wiltshire Council. The site constraints including conservation view corridors, proximity to residential and retirement properties and flooding combined with a genuine desire for the brief to be led by the people of Chippenham ensured that the building had to balance a need for size against regulations, and high levels of design against cost effectiveness to ensure a viable business case going forwards.