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The Woodlands Sports Pavilion is a revival of a key sports facility for Nene Park Trust in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire. Our design will see a new sports pavilion built with accessible changing facilities, community spaces and a year-round Multi-Use Games Area (MUGA).

Open since the late 1980s, Nene Park Trust took over the Woodlands sports facilities in 2017 and the site today is home to a number of local sports teams – including Thorpe Rangers FC and Bharat and Bretton Cricket Clubs.

The reinvention of the site is part of Nene Park Trust’s aim to support local community sports teams, and wider community access to sports, fitness and wellbeing – particularly for women and BAME communities, capitalising on a summer of sport that saw them take centre stage in the UEFA Women’s Euros, The Hundred and Women’s Six Nations.

Simple forms honouring agricultural heritage

The Woodlands Pavilion is conceived as a cluster of simple building forms, arranged to embrace the sports pitches that encircle it: Football, Cricket and Tennis. This organisational idea serves to break down the scale of the pavilion into a series of smaller masses – consistent with the agricultural heritage of the rural landscape. The approach ensures the building maintains a sensitive relationship with the context of it’s site, the village and wider rural setting, including nearby Conservation Area, Listed Buildings and Scheduled Ancient Monument.

The pavilion’s material identity reinforces the agricultural heritage from which it is derived. Walls would be finished in two types of timber. A natural finish, selected from available British grown species, would be reserved for the changing block and multi-function hall; the natural finish referencing the buttery tonnes of brick and stone in the village.

The single storey-volume would be finished in black stained or Shou Sugi Ban timber. At high level, deep timber fins create an interplay of light and shadow across the façade, with the pattern and texture changing throughout the day. Pitched roofs are to be clad in black standing seam metal, a direct reference to the roofs of local agricultural buildings.

Throughout the process we have worked closely with a skilled design team, including Landscape Architects Sheils Flynn. Through the wider site proposals, biodiversity of the site will be raised through 995m² of wildflower lawns, complimented by an extensive wildflower green roof on the pavilion, with over 49 species to give a suitable environment for insects and invertebrates.

Alongside the Structural and Building Services Engineers, Webb Yates, we have developed a scheme that minimises the use of steel that will be needed in the construction. Instead, cross-laminated timber (CLT) will be used in combination with timber glulam beams, to create a series of large-span, column free spaces.

Meeting ambitions on environment and accessibility

As well as creating space to diversify those who actually use community pitches and facilities, we’ve aligned our design with Nene Park Trust’s environmental ambitions, through the application of the core principles of sustainable design: high quality insulation; superior windows; mechanical ventilation and heat recovery (MVHR); airtight construction; and, no thermal bridging. The site proposals will also feature a ground source heat pump (GSHP) and solar panels, alongside electric vehicle charging points.

Nene Park Trust has an ambitious Access Policy and it was important that the Pavilion design was based on the principles of inclusive design. We have worked closely with Access Matters, the Trust’s access consultant, to ensure that the access strategy is aligned with best practice, to ensure that there are opportunities with a wide range of access requirements to use the building therefore contributing to its sustainable use in the long term. This includes the provision of larger changing rooms and a separate Changing Places room.

A planning application was submitted in Winter 2023 and is currently being considered by Peterborough City Council.

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