Worsley, Salford, United Kingdom
The Welcome Building RHS Garden Bridgewater by Hodder+Partners for The Royal Horticultural Society combines sustainability with accessible and universal design, achieving a light-filled and multi-functional center that blurs the edge between building and landscape.
For its commitment to sustainable design, The Welcome Building RHS Garden Bridgewater has recently been awarded a 2022 International Architecture Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
The Royal Horticultural Society is the world’s leading gardening charity, inspiring passion and excellence in the science, art, and practice of horticulture.
As part of its development program, the RHS pledged to find and develop a site for a fifth national garden in northwest England.
In 2015, in collaboration with Salford City Council and Peel Land and Property, it announced the vision to create a new garden at the 154-acre Worsley New Hall estate.
RHS Garden Bridgewater is the largest gardening project in Europe and has become a major new tourism and horticultural destination that aspires to welcome and inspire up to 700,000 people a year within a decade.
The estate of the site was established by the f Earl of Ellesmere in the mid-nineteenth-century.
This comprised a grand Neogothic mansion designed by Edward Blore, formal gardens by William Nesfield, and one of the largest wall gardens in the UK, which sustained the family.
The house fell into disrepair after World War II, eventually being demolished in 1949. In subsequent years the grounds were used as a garden center, a Scout camp, and a rifle range.
Hodder+Partners was invited to design a new world-class visitor center, known as The Welcome Building, to provide a gateway to the new garden as well as a visitor meeting and interaction point, restaurant, gift shop, offices, and educational spaces.
The design is a horizontal composition thatseeks to respond to a commanding horizon defined by the elevated Bridgewater Canal and the low-lying landscape; the horizontal form creating a linear strike in the landscape.
The building is designed predominantly as one open space, allowing visitors to flow between the various uses: ticketing, learning, retail, plant sales, and café.
All of these public elements are contained under a single overarching glulam timber diagrid, supported on structural glulam trees, allowing the space to flex in response to seasonal demands.
The roof extends beyond the enclosure to the North and South, blurring the edge between building and landscape, where it turns up and down at its edge, responding to the location of entrances, expressing specific uses, framing views, and forming solar shading.
The horizontal form is broken by a series of projecting timber ‘boxes’ sitting below the main roof, which house prescribed uses such as the kitchen, WCs, offices, and learning studios.
The timber forms extend east beyond the building with a timber decking floating over a newly formed lake.
Externally, the roof is clad in vertical Siberian Larch, while the projecting boxes are clad horizontally.
Glazed curtain walling spans between the ground and the roof to provide panoramic views to the gardens and surrounding landscape.
Natural light permeates the building either through Siberian Larch louvered curtain walling or filters through the diagrid roof via two roof lights, one running centrally and one creating a glasshouse environment.
The whole seeks to capture a piece of the outside, inside.
Sustainability is at the heart of the proposals and embedded in the work of RHS.
The building benefits from rainwater harvesting, a wildflower roof enhancing biodiversity, underfloor heating and cooling via a ground source heat pump creating a balance of annual heating and cooling energy, and natural cross-ventilation.
The visually impressive timber roof and extensive timber cladding provide a constant reminder of the project’s environmental aims and the sequestering of approximately 350 tons of carbon into the structure of the building.
Surface water drainage infrastructure is entirely based around SUDS principals, including a permeable car park construction, filter strips, swales, and a storm water attenuation pond designed to contain on-site the rainwater associated with a 1 in a 100-year storm event plus a 30% allowance for climate change.
Accessibility and universal design have been considered throughout the scheme, with step free access from entrance to all areas of the building and gardens.
Accessible sanitary facilities have been integrated into the design with high-quality finishes throughout, including the provision of a fully compliant Changing Places facility, allowing visitors with additional needs to be catered for in a comfortable and dignified manner.
Project: The Welcome Building RHS Garden Bridgewater
Architects: Hodder+Partners
Client: The Royal Horticultural Society
General Contractor: BAM Construct UK
Photographers: Peter Cook
