A new cultural centre and library for a rapidly developing village in Berkshire.

A community building for the 21st century, the School Green Centre is a well-being hub, public library, creche, after-school club and venue, all rolled into one. The centre provides two connected performance halls, a destination café, lending library, nursery services, a family of meeting rooms and offices for Shinfield Parish Council.

Like many towns and villages in the south-east of England, Shinfield is experiencing rapid residential development and requires new social infrastructure. In 2018 the Council held a RIBA design competition for a new ‘coherent community and cultural centre’ on School Green, the historic public space at the heart of the village. AOC won first prize and were appointed to design the project, funded by developer contributions.

AOC worked closely with the Council, resident stakeholders and adjacent land users to develop a viable brief and build social capital. Public engagement identified a key ambition; to create a local space for families to socialise, an inclusive alternative to the traditional public house.

The project includes the demolition and redevelopment of a derelict British Legion Hall site and the redevelopment of the existing adjacent Parish Hall, transforming existing spaces to create an integrated community centre.

The new building combines two archetypes, a tower and a barn, sampled from the Thames Valley vernacular and synthesised to create a contemporary building that is particular to the place and resonates with its past.

The tower provides a raised room for the community to meet, its elevated position reinforcing the importance of civic assembly with views out to the village green. Its butterfly roof reflects the roof pitches of the neighbouring houses and mirrors them to create a distinct silhouette. Below, an open public living room, a glazed cafe, is a contemporary take on the raised town hall’s covered marketplace.

The barn is a grand hall with a big roof to host and shelter the community’s events, performances and celebrations. A low eaves reinforces the sense of safe enclosure. Generous doors and dormers create a grand scale to the public north.

The composite building provides an extended family of distinct rooms that support new uses in response to the needs of community groups and local service providers. The communal spaces are spatially efficient and encourage hybrid uses.

The public library service sits within the café space operated by a local business, a mutually beneficial synergy that bolsters a growing sense of community. The cafe opens out onto a patio terrace overlooking both the historic village green and a proposed retail centre, actively connecting new and old forms of village life. The welcome foyer and the three larger halls open onto the walled garden, a calm, soft retreat that supports contemplation and gentle serendipity.

The new community centre seeks to minimise both embodied energy and operational carbon. The creative reuse and thermal upgrades of the existing Parish Hall helps significantly reduce the embodied energy of the new centre. The area has a long history of quarrying gravel and the School Green tower is covered in roughcast render, its coarse gravel providing robustness and depth to the tall surfaces.

The ‘fabric first’ approach, minimises heat loss and heat gain through high levels of insulation and airtightness. Generally the building optimises natural stack and cross ventilation as part of a passive approach, whilst the halls with high occupancy use mixed-mode mechanical services only when occasionally required. The site benefits from air source heat pumps as part of an all-electric site strategy with the energy load further reduced through rooftop photovoltaic energy generation.

RIBA Design Competition. First Prize. Realised.

Awards

• RIBA Regional (South) Award 2024
• RIBA Regional (South) Client of the Year Award 2024
• Civic Trust Regional Finalist (South East) 2024
• AJ Architecture Awards: Civic Project shortlisted 2023
• Dezeen Awards Civic Project Longlisted 2024
• Public Building Architect of the Year shortlisted 2023 & 2024