Wednesday, June 3, 2015

News: New look for Rotherham College building

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The refurbished Rotherham College town centre campus is set to get a new look after plans were submitted that involve re-cladding the whole of the outside of the prominent Eastwood Building.

The town centre campus buildings have undergone significant transformations during the 1930's 1960's and 1980's. As the campus expanded, business and houses within the local community were replaced with the Eastwood Building, Clifton Building and Howard Building.

Rotherham College has invested over £15m in the last three years improving the facilities after securing government funding and a £5m loan from the council. Refurbishment was undertaken to the Clifton and Eastwood buildings over three separate floors and included the opening of the new hair and beauty salons and new science and metallurgy labs. The engineering department has been renovated to create the new Engineering Centre of Excellence.

The £7m Wentworth Building opened in 2011, also on the town centre campus. The modern eco-friendly building is home high quality classrooms and state-of-the-art facilities.

RCAT also developed its Catering and Hospitality Department with a new exterior and refurbished interior of the Wharncliffe restaurant and took on the former Charter Arms pub nearby and converted into a Higher Education Hub. The Howard Building was deemed surplus to requirement and recently sold to property developers.

Now the exterior of the Eastwood Building on Howard Street / Wharncliffe Street / Drummond Street is in line for modernisation with "overcladding" and window replacement of the existing building. If approved, the scheme involves aluminium rain-screen cladding replacing the concrete panels and the installation of new aluminium doors and composite timber windows faced with aluminium.
The plans have been put together by BPA Architecture with experts, d+b facades, whose overcladding materials have been used on a number of HE and FE buildings in the UK.

Rotherham College has had to take a piecemeal approach to redeveloping its facilities. Planning permission was secured for a £70m redevelopment of the town centre campus in January 2009, the same month as the much publicised national debacle regarding the allocation of capital funds for projects by the Learning & Skills Council which meant that funding would not be forthcoming.

Rotherham College website

Images: RCAT / BPA Architecture

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