CASE STUDY | HOULTON SCHOOL SIGNAL BOOST Turning a radio transmitter station into a sustainable new school for Rugby involved vastly improving the historic fabric of the building while designing new teaching blocks to a high thermal performance to ensure top marks for low energy use. Andy Pearson reports O n the outskirts of Rugby is a collection of Grade II listed 1920s buildings that originally housed Rugby Radio Stations radio transmitter. First opened in 1926 to send radio messages to the Commonwealth, it continued to evolve so that at its zenith in the 1950s it was the largest radio transmitting station in the world. Formerly known as C Station, it consisted of two main buildings; the taller Transmission Hall housed its large, very low frequency transmitter, while the shorter Power Hall was home to the generators. When it was built, the building stood in fields circled by an array of 57 aerial masts, 12 of which were 250m high. Now, the radio buildings are in the centre of an emerging new mini-town named Houlton, which is being jointly developed by Urban & Civic and Aviva Investors. As part of the new development the listed radio station buildings have been innovatively incorporated into a new secondary school for 1,200 students in the heart of the development. Architect van Heyningen & Hawards (vHH) design for the school is based on five blocks. It is a scheme of two parts: the two repurposed listed structures, along with three new blocks. All the conventional teaching spaces are grouped into two of the new blocks, one of which houses classrooms for teaching humanities, the other incorporating laboratories for science teaching. A sports hall makes up the third. The remaining functions are fitted into spaces in the existing buildings. Minor adaptions enabled the Power Hall to accommodate the schools dining and assembly halls. More significant interventions were needed in the Transmission Building, including the addition of a new internal steelwork frame, threaded through the first floor slab, to provide an additional three storeys of accommodation for the teaching of art, music and dance, along with a new top floor, to replace the roof destroyed in a fire, which is now the sixth form space. The Education and Skills Funding Agencys (ESFA) output specification set minimum energy performance requirements for the new buildings. However, there were no ESFA targets for the repurposed existing buildings, a factor that could have resulted in the school having to use more energy to maintain comfort conditions than it would, had these spaces instead been accommodated in 32 November 2022 www.cibsejournal.com CIBSE Nov 22 pp32-34, 36 Houghton school.indd 32 21/10/2022 17:19