Hengrove Leisure Centre.

Sustainable design goes swimmingly.

Located in the heart of South Bristol, the £35 million Hengrove Leisure Centre is the centrepiece of a major regeneration programme. A sub-regional centre of sporting facilities excellence, it opened to the community in February 2012. Since that time it’s enabled many local people to more easily participate in sport and physical activity, with a 10-lane Olympic swimming pool, 400-person spectator viewing gallery, teaching pool, spa area, dance studios, fitness suite, crèche, climbing wall, sports hall, and café.

Target surpassed.

Bristol City Council’s environmental policy was to reduce carbon emissions by 10 percent – a tough challenge – so managing energy use and costs were a key part of our objectives. We defined a robust energy strategy that eclipsed the council’s target completely, with a more than 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions.

The heroes of this sustainable design were: a combined heat and power and biomass boiler; fully addressable building maintenance service to monitor and control the main plant; and a sub-metered main plant to keep track of energy usage. This result is in a low-carbon building for a high-energy-usage client, and a BREEAM Excellent rating achieved.

Competition standard.

Building an Olympic-standard swimming pool also requires very specific competition lighting levels and water temperature. We carefully modelled the control of daylight and artificial lighting to minimise glare for swimmers, life guards, and spectators… all enabling a safer and more enjoyable swimmer and spectator experience.