Two consents that could not be built. Now 34 homes on site.
Block B, the 1906 cycle works: retained red brick and terracotta below a new zinc-clad top storey.
A buy-to-rent developer's two-phase regeneration on Foleshill Road, with a different Rickett Architects role on each building.
Rickett Architects schedules, job 3267. Net sums the units; gross adds circulation.
Key dates across both blocks, from the inherited consents to construction on site.
The 1906 works converted and topped with a new storey, and a contemporary studio block filling the gap beside it.
Block A, the new studio block, set between the existing terrace and the 1906 works.
The consented layout. Block A, solid, sits in the corner plot beside the locally listed works. Drawing 3267_s3_200.
Block A sits between an existing terrace and the locally listed 1906 works.
Ground, first and second, and third floors, stepped off the easement line.
New cores and stairs worked around the central entrance of the retained building.
Repeated to the upper floors over the retained masonry.
Land bought. Permission in hand. Nothing to act on.
A ground survey found a power cable the consent had never accounted for. Block A was redesigned around it and re-consented: ten studios stepped back off the one-metre clearance line, granted January 2024 and now in construction.
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Four fixed constraints on one site: the Coventry Canal Conservation Area, the locally listed 1906 works next door, a long-broken street frontage, and a power-cable easement with one metre of clearance and cables to north and south.
Both phases already carried planning permission when we were appointed. But a permission is not a buildable scheme, and on the studio plot that gap was about to become a problem. The brief was to take the locally listed building's conversion through to construction, and to make the new studio block deliverable. The second job turned into a complete redesign.
The easement only surfaced when detailed design began and the ground was surveyed. In the words of the Design and Access Statement, it "massively impacted the shape of the design". For Block A we prepared and submitted a fresh full application: a four-storey building of 11.75 m on a 267 sqm site, ten studios from 23 to 41 sqm. The easement became the form. The building steps back at the corner of its plot with a receding, angled-brick slant that cuts the apparent massing and keeps the locally listed works the dominant building on the street, in red brick chosen to echo the 1906 building in a deliberately quieter contemporary language.
A heritage statement set out why the smaller new building would enhance, not harm, the conservation area: filling the gap in the street scene and clearing the derelict car park that had degraded the locally listed building's setting. A protracted, roughly year-long Section 106 negotiation followed, securing the student-accommodation tenure that had to be locked down before the council could issue the decision. Consent was granted on 5 January 2024. The fabric beats Part L 2021 on every element, with a roof-mounted photovoltaic array, modelled at around 37% below the Part L 2021 carbon target.
A permission is a set of drawings a council will approve. A building is a set a contractor can price, a funder can lend against and building control can pass.
With the Design and Access Statement and the Heritage Statement, both written in house, and the noise, air quality, transport, energy and landscape consultants coordinated alongside.
At up to A0, across 36 recorded issues between February 2022 and December 2024, to the client, the structural, civil and M&E engineers, building control, the landscape architect, the QS and the contractor.
Interiors modelled alongside the drawings, so the scheme can be understood, and sold, before it is built.
Interior visualisation, indicative of the design intent. Not a photograph of a completed apartment.
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