Sports Hall for Atlantic College

UWC Atlantic College is located in the 12th Century St Donat’s Castle in the Vale of Glamorgan. UWC Atlantic College is the founding college of a global education movement and international residential school. Each year, 350 students aged 16-19 from over 90 different countries benefit from a world-

class International Baccalaureate (IB) educational experience. It offers one of the most comprehensive scholarship programme at pre university level. The clients brief requested that we

designed and delivered a multipurpose sport / college facility that would accord with the Sport England guidelines for sporting facilities and that would achieve a BREEAM rating of very good.

Under the JCT Design & Build Contract 2011 form of contract we were commissioned to construct a new sports hall facility to cater for 250 students, 4 badminton courts, 1 basketball court, 1 five a-side football pitch, a dance studio, a gymnasium, changing facilities and a commercial kitchen and cafeteria. We were also responsible for discharging some onerous Non Material Amendments to the planning conditions along with the discharge of some 25 conditions and the scheme was constructed under the watchful eye of an Archaeologist, Ecologist, Arboriculturalist, Acoustician and BREEAM assessors.

The building was founded onto the rock of the existing cliff face and because of the restricted land area there was a need for us to form a 5m deep cut into the existing cliff face in order to gain the much needed ground floor capacity. In order to reduce differential settlement we then followed the line of the cliff face in order to form the founding levels of our deep trench fill concrete foundations. All excavated rock was crushed on site and recycled and reused within the construction of the building.