Project

Houlton School

The Houlton Secondary School development is an ambitious and transformative new project which has a central role in a major new development of Houlton, on the outskirts of Rugby.

The centrepiece of the project is the listed C-Station building, which served as a transmission hub throughout the 20th century and played a key role in the development of worldwide communication.

The re-imagining of C Station involves the refurbishment of the existing radio station building into the primary structure of a new educational campus, which will serve as the secondary school as well as one of the centrepieces for the new urban development. The new school will be one of several serving a new community and fulfils the dual purpose of providing the new educational facility as well as securing the future of the listed radio station building.

Another key design goal was to make C-Station an important part of the new housing community, by ensuring the demands of community use events are met by the fire safety provisions.

"OFR provided fire strategy advice for the whole school site as well as providing fire strategy services for individual building plots. The key challenges of the project were cantered around achieving a creative design which complements the historic elements of the existing structure while also providing a flexible and safe school environment, with the capacity to serve the educational needs of the new development."

Architect

VHH Architects logo

Developer

Urban and Civic logo

Gross project value

£32m

Did you know?

Urban Splash’s multi-award winning and now thriving regeneration scheme at New Islington, Manchester was once known as the Cardroom Estate — an area so notorious that taxis would refuse to stop there and it once served as a backdrop to TV’s Shameless.