Background

Like many local councils, Slough Borough Council had specific housing needs to meet and a portfolio of redundant sites within the borough in their ownership that they wished to utilise. OSG were appointed by Slough Borough Council to work with them and Osbourne Homes to bring forward land, design schemes to meet their specific needs and obtain planning permission to develop the sites into residential properties.

Specifics

The former Langley Police Station site was identified as a site suitable for residential development and OSG worked with Slough to develop a scheme suitable for the site that would meet their housing needs, in particular to provide HMO (House of Multiple Occupancy) and step-up accommodation for adults with special educational needs.

The brief was to redevelop the existing Police Station which involved a complete restructuring and refurbishment of the existing building to adapt it for a series of studio apartments. We also designed a scheme for the surrounding land to provide an HMO bungalow for adults with special educational needs, alongside some step-up accommodation for them to transition into when a more independent living style was deemed suitable.

The design was developed in close partnership with the Slough teams responsible for delivering this type of specialist accommodation to ensure that the specific needs were met within the design.

Challenges

Working with the constraints of an existing building always adds an additional level of complexity and in this case, there were three major constraints we had to consider:

1. The fact that the existing building had a concrete frame.
2. Being a former police station meant that staircases were configured in a particular way so as to only access certain floors.
3. A large main drain which cut diagonally through the site

Construction details and specification

Although the scheme has not been built, the design was for an MMC timber-frame modular construction that would have all been fabricated off-site, by Osbourne Homes’ timber frame company, Innovaro.

Added value

We were able to overcome the issue of the main sewer through close co-ordination and with the relevant parties to achieve more dwellings on the site than was originally thought possible.

Summary

Thorough consultation and due diligence achieved a well thought out scheme that delivered greater value to the client than originally anticipated in terms of the number of dwellings achievable and delivered on all of the key housing objectives set out:

• HMO
• Accommodation provision for adults with educational needs
• Step-up accommodation
• Retention and re-use of the existing building.