A landmark building providing essential public services and colocated cultural facilities for a new community in the UK's first garden city in 100 years.

Whitecliffe is a new neighbourhood of 6,250 homes being built in a chalk quarry in Ebbsfleet Valley in south-east England. Working with Ebbsfleet Development Corporation we have developed a neighbourhood civic and cultural infrastructure plan to support the 16,000 new residents and the existing community in adjacent Swanscombe.

The civic infrastructure includes the new city's hardware - its open spaces, schools and civic buildings - and its software - the social organisations and groups that structure civic life.

The first of three proposed landmark civic buildings in Ebbsfleet, the Alkerden Hub will sit at the geographical centre of the neighbourhood in the new Market Centre.

Co-designed with service providers, cultural co-locators and residents it will provide a Lifelong Learning Centre, library, health & wellbeing centre, community police, religious centre and a range of facilities for performance and production by professionals and the local community.

Through the co-location of essential services with cultural activities it aims to nurture and support a diverse, productive public realm in the new garden city.

Acknowledging the changing needs of public services and shifting market demands the hub is designed to provide efficient, flexible floors and inter-connected public rooms. A four storey western block provides adaptable offices that can easily respond to evolving public services, designed in accordance with the BCO specification for offices and the Government Workplace Design Guide, as well as the NHS’s Health Building Note 00-01 ‘Designing Health and Community Buildings’. Internally, the floorplates are organised to provide maximum flexibility within a standard 1.5m office grid. Meeting the structural needs of a diverse range of uses it allows whole or sub-divided floor plates to be let by public partner organisations and private tenants.

In the eastern block, three connected public rooms – Small, Medium, Large – allow the building to host a diverse range of professional and community groups, from a class of 30 to an audience of 450. The two flexible blocks of accommodation are connected by a full height, public living room, a shared welcome foyer, circulation and community café, that provides a significant public interior in the town.

The site's long history as a settlement provides a rich catalogue of past forms to sample and synthesise to accommodate new uses. In this way a new social centre in an apparently empty chalk quarry is imbued with historical meaning to support and nurture the civic life of the new community.

The building is designed to BREEAM Outstanding, a sustainable exemplar for new public buildings in the new garden city and the wider region. Embodied carbon is minimised with a glulam frame and CLT floors, providing 40% less carbon emissions than an equivalent concrete frame. Operational carbon is minimised through natural ventilation assisted by a central solar chimney. Generous floor to ceiling heights maximise daylight and allow for mechanical servicing to be fitted in future for healthcare and other serviced uses. Air source heat pumps and roof mounted photovoltaic panels provide clean energy.

A contemporary take on the traditional Kent vernacular of tile-hung, timber framed buildings, large local clay tiles provide a robust, non-combustible exterior. The two tones articulate the different uses in the building and combine to highlight the main entrance and public living room.