NEWS ARTICLE: Brewery site redeveloped by CZWG and Conran & Partners
(Paul Shepheard, Building Design, 11 April 2008, www.bdonline.co.uk )
A historic brewery site in Dorchester houses a major mixed-use development just getting under way.
Dorchester is an old Roman town, the centre of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, a place pickled in history. It has only 20,000 inhabitants but a shopping catchment of a quarter of a million spread out over the rich, white plains of the south.
The town is centred on a high street crafted by time into a poem of England, a poem sounding like Hardy but which like all county town poems now includes the line “John Menzies, Nationwide and Tesco plc”. On its southern edge, Poundbury sprawls challengingly across the landscape, an ordinary English suburb knocked straight by good intentions, determined to set an example to the others.
And in the middle, on a hook of land presently occupied by two enormous Victorian brewery buildings, CZWG is building a new town fragment different from Poundbury in many particulars. It has now started on site and will finally be completed in 2012.
The main obstacle has been the four-and-a-half-year wait for the planners to put together the supplementary guidance document for the area, which in the end bears a resemblance to CZWG’s own masterplan. It’s not complicated: link between rail station and old town network crosses the site in straight line via public square in front of funky old buildings, with residential quarter — not suburb — to the east.
The boon of this project is that it has real town centre jobs to do. The brewery has isolated the train station from the town for 130 years, and here is a chance to make that connection work. Then there is the bullish confidence of the brewery buildings themselves, built in that mid-Victorian way that makes you think twice about knocking them down. Here is a way to release the energy embedded in them.
CZWG, together with Conran & Partners, which is working on the existing buildings, has a commission from Andrew Wadsworth’s Brewery Square to do both things. It’s an ambitious project to construct a varied, vital and sustainable new quarter. Varied means that the architects are designing more than 30 buildings, deliberately differentiated to match the complexities of old Dorchester, a not inconsiderable task given the role that time plays in such thing.
Vital means plenty of public space, an arts centre and a cinema. And sustainable? Close-quarter, mixed-use development is part of it, plus the whole parcel has a combined heat and power system running on locally sourced wood waste, and the UK’s first entirely solar-powered train station at Dorchester South (on the Victoria to Weymouth line).
But what about the buildings? It’s difficult to tell yet, as building has they’ve only just started. What we have to go on is a set of renderings, not done by the architects, that show all the corners but little of the ambience. They are the sort of drawings that show double yellow lines, traffic tables and Audis parked in the streets but no fallen leaves or litter or sun glinting off drainage grilles. They make approximations of everything which purport to be exactitudes.
One of the apartment blocks is vintage CZWG, whose waving facades weave balconies into them, and whose street side has a colonnade of bulging columns made of red rubbed bricks. Doesn’t that sound appetising? And yet in these drawings, the shapes are just shapes, made of co-ordinates and fill. The scary detail that makes the best of CZWG’s architecture sing so loudly is elided. I don’t know how much representation matters; it’s part of the selling. But together with design and build, which is a possibility, it could be a problematic dilution. I do hope the architects supervise the construction.
For more information please contact: Emilie Lemons, Conran & Partners: cp@conranandpartners.com
April 2008
