The listed building in the courtyard the layout exists to protect. A visualisation of the consented scheme, not a photograph. The value in a site like this is not the permission it already carries, it is finding the use that the place will actually take.
The full story
Audley Holdings acquired a prominent site in the middle of Rugby that already held planning permission. Around 93,000 sq ft of offices, a hotel and ground floor retail had been consented to an earlier design team, and the permission had been implemented on paper so that it could not lapse. Then the market for that accommodation disappeared. The site, built around an eighteenth century Grade II listed building, sat largely unused for the better part of a decade.
We were appointed in October 2012. The first job was feasibility: testing what the implemented commercial envelope could actually become rather than what it had been drawn as. The answer was extra care. The existing footprint and volume could carry around 73 two-bed homes, and the bulky additions the commercial scheme had piled onto the listed building could be stripped back. That single move, reducing the extension to the listed building, became the heart of the heritage case and it is the reason the rest of the scheme was arguable at all.
The site was three plots in one. Herbert Gray College House, the Grade II listed eighteenth century building, had to be kept and brought back into use. Marjorie Hume House, identified as locally important, was to be retained. The redundant St Andrews Parish Hall was to come down and make way for new homes. All of it sits inside the Rugby Town Centre Conservation Area, immediately beside the Grade II listed parish church.
That stacked up a long line of tests, each with the power to stop the scheme. English Heritage was a statutory consultee. Mature trees were protected by Tree Preservation Orders. Bats and below ground archaeology both needed survey and mitigation. An adjacent leisure use raised a noise question that called for acoustic work. The only vehicular access came off Little Church Street at a substandard junction. And a Section 106 agreement had to be settled before any consent could be issued.
From there the layout followed the building. New apartment blocks were pushed to the edges of the site so the listed building kept its enclosed courtyard and its formal frontage was left to read. Two-storey mews replaced the parish hall, working with Marjorie Hume House to form a smaller second court. The communal facilities, with a public cafe, were placed as the shared focus and the public face of the scheme, so it would give something back to the town centre rather than turn its back on it.
Overall the homes sit within the same height as the approved commercial scheme, taking one extra residential storey inside that envelope, and using around 72,000 sq ft against the commercial consent's 93,000. Materials were zinc, copper and timber on the new blocks, with brick and render on the mews, and the scheme was heated by air source heat pumps with underfloor distribution, which carried the ten per cent carbon reduction the local policy asked for.
We ran a public exhibition at the parish hall and presented to local stakeholders before submitting, then took the full planning and listed building applications through more than two years of technical negotiation on highways, trees, noise, ecology and archaeology. Three extensions of time were agreed along the way. Full planning permission and listed building consent were both granted on 21 June 2016, once the Section 106 agreement had been completed. Our role ran across RIBA Stages 0 to 3.
The scheme was not built. The site was subsequently remarketed as fully consented and a different proposal by others came forward for it. What the work produced was a fresh, deliverable extra care permission on a site that had been stuck, and the heritage case to support it, carried through a conservation area, a listed building and a full slate of consultees to a clean, issued decision.
