CATHERINE HUGHES BUILDING PLANNING APPROVAL
MAY 2017
Our new student accommodation scheme for Somerville College, has been awarded planning approval unanimously by Oxford City Council. The project, known as the Catherine Hughes Building, will provide 68 bedrooms, allowing the College to accommodate all their undergraduates on site. This is our third building for Somerville College, further to our work on the ROQ student housing and the extension to the Philip Dowson designed Wolfson building.
The new building has a frontage on to Walton Street, with a Graduate Reading Room at ground floor level. The use of red brick will reflect the neighbouring buildings, with articulated brickwork elements around generous windows to provide a rhythm to the façade. Framed setbacks at third floor level allow the new building to align with key levels on the adjacent Penrose Building and to provide variety to the roof line. Internally, bedrooms are arranged in to clusters with kitchens and circulation spaces utilising direct and borrowed natural light and forming focal points for social activity.
Enabling works, involving the demolition of existing buildings, are due to commence in the next few months, with the main construction expected to start on site at the beginning of 2018.
A SITE FOR SAURIIS
JANUARY 2017
Our proposal to redevelop the grounds of the Natural History Museum is due to start on site this month. The work to the main entrance – the first of three phases – will introduce level access to this area for the first time while also restoring the Grade-I listed fabric to its former glory.
The works include changing levels, repaving the forecourt, restoring railings, installing planting, and repairing or reinstating original terracotta details across the site.
Ahead of this, the main entrance and central hall of the Museum are now closed while both teams gear up for construction – including some unusual enabling works. As part of these works Dippy the diplodocus has now been dismantled ahead of going on tour around the country; to be eventually recast in bronze for the next phase of our project.
The railings have now been removed for off-site restoration and re-painting:
And scaffolding is also going up for the removal of display cases and various specimens:
This will need to go up again halfway through construction of Phase 1 allow for delivery of the blue whale skull through our active site. Here it is just before it left the Museum.
If you’re wondering how that that will fit through the front doors, the answer’s simple: the same way the elephants do.
Phase 1 is due to complete mid-July ahead of the main entrance reopening to the public shortly after. In the meantime, there’s a pop-up conservation studio in the Darwin Centre – which we highly recommend – where you can see the conservationists at work restoring the whale’s bones.