June 2011
Halcrow Yolles’s Accrington Rail Station project in Lancashire has won the Sustainability Project Award at the 2011 North West Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) awards.
The winners were revealed on Thursday 12 May at a ceremony held at The Point at Lancashire County Cricket Ground. The awards celebrate inspirational initiatives in the land, property and construction sectors and 44 short-listed projects from all over the North West were hoping to win one of nine coveted RICS accolades. They had been drawn from an original entry of 70 projects.
The construction of a new and innovative eco rail station was carried out, and completed in August 2010, as part of Lancashire County Councils and Northern Rails commitment to continually improve the facilities to their customers.
The new station building was built on the brown field plot of land adjacent to the existing station. The building provides a new ticket booking facility for Northern Rail and a Lancashire County Council run community learning centre.
Lancashire County Councils aspiration was to raise the awareness of low carbon design and sustainable methods of construction within the community. This aspiration led to the inclusion of a community learning centre located within the station building. The learning centre is to be used primarily to educate local school children in sustainable and eco design issues that are particularly relevant in today's society.
Halcrow Yolles provided a variety of building engineering services for this project including building services, structural and civil engineering and acoustic consultancy. As a requirement of the european funding for the project, Halcrow Yolles also provided a site-based observational role on behalf of the client to help ensure quality of the structural and early civils works.
Working with Halcrow Yolles, SBS Architects were responsible for the aesthetical and building regulations design of the station ensuring it provided an attractive but functional building. The contractor, Strategic Team Group, were responsible for the construction of the building, car parking and access.
The building adopts sustainable design innovations such as photovoltaic panels located on the building roof and car park lighting columns, solar hot water heating and grey water harvesting. Within the fabric of the building, other innovations included recycled aggregate in the concrete, use of recycled stone for cladding of the building and external works, and lime render on the building exterior. The building achieved a BREEAM excellent rating, which was made possible due to the dedicated work of the design team and the encouragement and aspirations of a very knowledgeable client.