Award-winning centre a spur for regeneration

 The building’s construction, however, was not without substantial challenges, among them being difficulties in securing the required funding to treat former mine workings, and construct one and a half floors of underground car parking to make the site ready for building to start. HEJ editor Jonathan Baillie reports.

Aflagship LIFT project developed by Dudley InfraCare LIFT in the West Midlands, the new 10,000 m2 Brierley Hill Health and Social Care Centre is a striking contemporary-looking fivestorey building which, while extremely eye-catching in its own right, has an even more imposing profile due to its prominent hillside location. The building, which also recently won the “Best of the Black Country Regeneration Award”, was designed by Steffian Bradley Architects and built by Carillion. It brings together two GP surgeries formerly housed in 1970s-built premises which were not well-suited to the expansion of services desired by the local PCT, with additional services such as dentistry, audiology, podiatry, and physiotherapy, previously provided at a number of locations across the Dudley borough. Brierley Hill itself was once a thriving former glass and steel manufacturing area at the heart of the Black Country. However since the gradual decline in such traditional industries, and the closure, for instance, in late 1982, of the Round Oak steelworks – now the site of the adjacent Merry Hill Shopping Centre – it has seen high levels of unemployment and neglect. It is now acknowledged as one of England’s more socially deprived areas. Nevertheless, thanks to the strong working partnerships built up between Dudley InfraCare LIFT, Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council, Dudley Primary Care Trust, and independent organisations such as the locally-formed Brierley Hill Regeneration Partnership, as well as funding from the local Regional Development Agency, Advantage West Midlands, the area is enjoying a renaissance as part of a long-term regeneration programme. Shining out at its heart, “like a beacon”, as lead architect Tim Woolcott put it, is the new £26.3 million health and social care centre. Designed by Steffian Bradley Architects for Dudley InfraCare LIFT, the building took Carillion only around 18 months to complete, despite considerable site challenges. These included a sharply sloping site, the simultaneous construction of a new bypass road built to relieve the congested local high street, the proximity of other local buildings, and the fact that the site was, in the architect’s words, “peppered with mine workings”.

Spread over five floors