Waltham Town Hall Campus

Description

Creating a new neighbourhood in the heart of the London Borough of Waltham Forest. Refurbishing historic buildings and opening up the Campus to the public.

Background
Waltham Forest Council want to transform their historic Town Hall Campus into a thriving new neighbourhood. This will see staff from ten older, less efficient council offices move into new office space on the main site. The land unlocked by this move and gained by demolishing the Magistrates court will then be used for much-needed housing.

Challenges
Our initial task was looking at the existing site to see how constrained it was – evaluating how this might affect the proposed developments. There was much consideration of enabling works, as well as how to refurbish the existing buildings. Working closely with the architectural teams was crucial as they had a lot of planning challenges – especially around strict carbon reduction.

Solutions
On the residential side, the site will contribute to the much-needed building of over 200 new homes for local people, with 50% affordable. Each block will have an off-site central energy centre to comply with carbon levels targets. On the civic side, the new-build offices were made as low carbon as possible with natural ventilation and passive cooling. From a parity point of view, similar careful adjustments were made to the existing Town Hall.