Avon River Climbing Centre Chippenham, North Wiltshire, South West England Building, English Architecture Photos
Avon River Climbing Centre in North Wiltshire
15 Sep 2022
Design: Artel31
Location: Chippenham, North Wiltshire, South West England, UK

Photos by Pete Helme and Paul Twomey @ TCA
Avon River Climbing Centre, England
Avon River Climbing Centre was one of the UK’s first purpose built climbing centres

What was the brief"

The brief was to improve an area of disused sports fields which were prone to flooding. The client was a local charity with a desire to bring significant benefit to the local town which had long missed out on investment. The brief was built by the local population through a series of community engagement meetings each seeking out key stake holders and offering up alternative visions for the area of land.
What were the key challenges"

Sitting on a flood plain we needed to not only ensure the building and its users were safe in the case of highwater levels but also to ensure that the site could hold more water after we undertook the work to protect properties downstream. The building itself is lifted 1.5m into the air on stilts and large compensatory volumes were excavated.

The extremely small number of centres previously built from scratch meant we had to research internationally to find the information needed to balance to requirements of energy usage while accounting for chalk dust, which is extremely light and had to be consi...