A new net zero carbon theatre in a historic town centre, hosting national touring artists and providing essential social infrastructure for diverse local communities.

The Andover New Theatre combines a high quality regional theatre with a community hub, creating a new public gathering place that supports the democratic life of the town. The new building provides a 400 seat main auditorium, 130 seat studio theatre, open air courtyard, dance studios, meeting rooms, shared workspace and a destination café.

Andover’s town centre has experienced diminishing activity in recent decades, socially and economically. Over the past five years Test Valley Borough Council have worked collaboratively with their residents, designers and business consultants to develop a bold new masterplan reimagining their town centre as a viable mixed-use place that supports flexible forms of living, working and exchange.

The first phase of the masterplan is to relocate the existing Lights Theatre from a college campus on the edge of town into a new building on the high street. In 2023, following an open competition, the council appointed AOC Architecture, Charcoalblue theatre consultants and Bristow project & cost managers to develop a new theatre. In November 2023 the proposals won £18.3m of Government funding, with the new theatre and cultural hub identified as an essential catalyst for the accelerated town centre redevelopment.

AOC worked closely with the theatre team and Council to develop and test a new brief for the larger town centre theatre, that would expand the existing model and engage new audiences. Through a series of collaborative workshops a set of shared priorities were developed, identifying the importance of:

• viability, for long term commercial and social success
• net zero carbon, embodied and operational
• acoustic separation, supporting different people doing different activities in the same building at the same time.

Andover’s medieval plan is defined by long narrow plots, with 500 year old public houses demonstrating the long term usefulness of the courtyard typology. The new theatre is sited on a 76m x 30m plot, a former retail unit at the edge of a 1970s shopping centre. A courtyard at the heart of the long site provides an outdoor performance space, spill out space for community uses and an acoustic buffer between auditorium and studio theatre.

The main entrance and foyer are located on the high street, an extension of the public realm providing an inclusive, accessible living room for Andover.

The new theatre is designed to be a small piece of town for performance and community uses, rather than one monotonous building. And like Andover, this new piece of town has different halls, studios, courtyards and cafes sitting next to each other, in different forms, made from different materials. Providing spaces for use by a diverse range of arts and community groups, the new Theatre celebrates the heterogeneity of its uses and users, continuing the eclectic variety that has defined its town centre for the past millennium.

A side entrance, connecting to the courtyard activates Waterloo Court, transforming a long foreboding alleyway into a busy intimate lane, connecting the the historic high street in the east with the Town Mills Riverside Park to the west.

The main auditorium is an adaptable proscenium stage with a capacity of 400 arranged over stalls, circle and balcony. The design prioritises warmth, intimacy and density with exposed natural materials creating a haptic audience experience with robust, low maintenance finishes. The studio theatre is a flexible public hall with retractable seating, mezzanine and windows to support black box performance and naturally lit activities.

The net zero carbon theatre minimises both embodied energy and operational carbon. Monolithic natural clay multi-cellular blocks provide a super-insulated load bearing envelope clad with terracotta tiles providing a robust, civic finish that complements the neighbouring buildings in the Andover Conservation Area. The composite structure uses the least material to do the most – slender recycled steel roof trusses for the performance spaces and engineered timber structure for the supporting spaces. The building optimises natural stack and cross ventilation as part of a passive approach, whilst the performance spaces with high occupancy use mixed-mode mechanical services with heat recovery only when occasionally required. The site benefits from water-source heat pumps using the nearby River Anton as part of an all-electric site strategy, with rooftop photovoltaic energy generation across the length of the site.

Competitive tender. First Prize. Concept Design completed 2024.