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7 September 2000
Essex may not be known for its mountains and hill breezes, but local children will soon be able to go mountaineering, and the county will get a wind turbine, allowing at least one public building in the area to be self-reliant in its energy requirements. Welcome to the award winning Discovery Centre, a model environmentally-friendly building that is part of the new 465 acre community of Great Notley Garden Village, that is being developed by Countryside Properties PLC near Braintree, Essex.
The Discovery Centre is being created within the 100 acre country park. It will contain a sports hall (with climbing wall), nature conservation and environmental education classrooms, as well as offices for the Park Rangers and a viewing terrace overlooking the Country Park. It will also facilitate and support a wide range of sports and leisure pursuits on adjacent playing fields and flood-lit courts.
The long awaited Great Notley Discovery Centre has now won a top design award - before the building work has even been completed. The £1.4 million eco-friendly centre has scooped the Environmental Initiative of the Year 2000 prize. The award is the latest in the long line of national accolades for Great Notley. It follows the recent success of Notley Green Primary School, which won the Millennium Schools Building of the Year award last month.
It will not be a day too soon for the Jones family, who live beside one of the cycleways in Great Notley Garden Village. "We use the Country Park all the time," says Angie, the school secretary at the village primary school.
Her eldest son, Adam, 10, says he is keen on the environment and approves of the Discovery Centre's green credentials, but it is the climbing wall that he is most looking forward to. "I love climbing anything that's safe, so that sounds perfect," says Adam. His brother Kieron, is not so excited about the climbing wall. "I'm quite scared of heights," he says, but he is looking forward to watching bird life from the glassed-in schoolroom.
"We often cycle over to the Country Park," says Angie. "And it will be great when there's something else for them to do when we get there."
The Discovery Centre is a three-storey timber structure that combines sports and education under one roof. Downstairs, there will be the sports hall, changing rooms, showers and toilets, while kitchen and education facilities will be on the first floor. Space will be provided for workshops and the three country park wardens' offices on the top floor. While all the technology is tried and tested, it is possibly the first time they have been brought together for a single public building.
Energy will be provided by a UK manufactured wind turbine positioned close to the Discovery Centre. It will produce all the energy required for lighting and heating, which will be stored in battery banks to be used on calmer days. When the sun shines, a solar roof system will also contribute to the electricity supply by pre-heating the running water supply to the showers and washing facilities.
The south face of the Discovery Centre is almost entirely glass, providing plenty of natural light and heat, but with a broad overhang for shade. The roof is aluminium which is easy to re-use and thoroughly insulated, whilst non-mechanised air vents in the roof can be adjusted to allow fresh air to be drawn through the building when necessary. There is also plenty of insulation to ensure that the building retains heat and keeps out the cold.
Sewage would normally have required several hundred metres of new pipes. Instead, the Discovery Centre's toilets will discharge into septic tanks and filter beds where water will be recycled and waste broken down into harmless fertilizer.
Countryside has also contained construction waste and let grass grow undisturbed round the Discovery Centre. "Leaving this ground cover is bringing back the plovers, and we've even got grebes and skylarks," says Richard Moore, Project Director of Countryside. "Just five years ago this was intensive agricultural farmland with little bio-diversity, so it's making a surprisingly quick recovery."
Yet Moore is convinced that it has cost no more to build and manage this site and centre than a conventional building and that it will be far cheaper to run. "On some days it will definitely be possible to sell electricity back to the National Grid," he says.
He added, "We are building a highly sustainable centre which will be a superb amenity, of undoubted lasting value, for Great Notley and the wider community in Braintree. I'm really looking forward to it being used for the first time in the Autumn."
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Information correct as at 07/09/2000