Birkin Building, Nottingham

Façade repairs to a significant Grade-II listed Victorian Lace Market building now used for city-centre office accommodation, supported by funding from the Heritage Action Zone.  The repair strategy was informed by detailed petrographic analysis of the building stone, with lime mortar repairs, new indented stone mouldings, and renewed lime render to parapets carefully integrated into the four-storey façade. The completed project has been extremely well received by the client, building occupants and local historic groups alike.

 

Client: Spenbeck

Location: Lace Market, Nottingham

"We were fortunate enough to work with Urban Fabric Architects on one of largest heritage-led redevelopments in our company’s history.  They guided us eloquently through the process and their knowledge, expertise and efficiency throughout has meant that we haven’t just completed the project but learnt a lot along the way.  The project is now being described by Historic England as ‘an exemplar of heritage-led regeneration’ and this honour is in huge part to Urban Fabric’s involvement."

 

Victoria Green, CEO, Spenbeck

 

 

Hampton Dene Primary School, Herefordshire


Urban Fabric were commissioned to develop design options for an expansion to the special school provision at Hampton Dene Primary School.  The chosen option enhances the classroom provision with small group rooms, break-out areas, a parent’s room, and covered dedicated external play areas.  The folded sectional form admits natural light and ventilation to interior break-out spaces and connects neatly with the form of the existing school.

 

Billesley Primary School

Working with Stan’s Café, a theatre company in Birmingham, Urban Fabric developed a new learning project for Year 5 students.  Over a series of participatory sessions, the students mapped their current accommodation, reflected on how they would wish their school to be laid out, and set about designing their future school and landscape.  The project encouraged the students to develop both their critical thinking and imaginative capacity.

 

Client: Billesley Primary School

Location: Birmingham

 

 

House Extension, Bakersfield, Nottingham

Working to an extremely tight footprint available within a limited front garden area, the entrance arrangement to an elegant interwar semi-detached house has been re-worked to incorporate accessible washroom accommodation on the ground floor for an elderly family member.  Responding to the client’s wishes for practical needs to be fulfilled alongside an attractive and welcoming new entrance arrangement, the design distils the playful arts-and-crafts architectural language of the locality with a distinctive local brick and render composition.

Herefordshire Schools Expansion Feasibility Studies


Herefordshire Council commissioned Urban Fabric to carry out feasibility studies of 21 of their primary, high and special schools. Each of these had been assessed to be likely to require expansion over the next ten years, and the Council were keen to ensure that design development was undertaken strategically so that all work addressed urgent requirements to provide ultimately a carbon-zero schools’ estate, to ensure each school was fully accessible and to provide layouts which supported each school’s pedagogy and site context.

 

Urban Fabric developed three options for each school, deploying a ‘small’, ‘medium’ or ‘large’ design approach, to allow the Council to have a flexible approach to respond to future funding provision, providing 63 developed designs in total. All designs were developed and tested with close engagement with each of the schools’ senior leadership teams.

Brooksby Old Hall


Brooksby Old Hall is a Grade II* listed country house dating from the late 16th Century, and extended in the 19th Century, built of coursed square ironstone with limestone dressings and Swithland slate roofs.   The house’s dining room was remodelled by Edwin Lutyens in the early 20th Century.  Urban Fabric were appointed to design and oversee an extensive external repairs conservation project, encompassing roof and chimney repairs, structural stabilisation, an overhaul of all exterior joinery, stone indenting, lime mortar repointing and repairs to lead rainwater goods.

The development of this website and its photography has been supported by the European Union Regional Development Fund