Station Building & Platform Repairs & Improvements

Property:  Ingatestone Station

Project: Station Building & Platform Repairs & Improvements

Service: Design & Detailing

Completed by Nicholas Kelly during previous employment with Dovetail Building Consultants

Property Listing: Grade 2 (special interest)

Significance:

The Victorian Station complex (Station Masters House, Ticket Office, Waiting Rooms, Signallers Cottage and early Pedestrian Bridge) provides a Conservation Area foci, with the buildings forming a key grouping.

The station buildings in a neo-Tudor style are amongst the earliest in Essex, and present an important surviving presentation, evidencing the evolution of railway station development.

Value: Estimated Works Value £290,000

Issues & Operational Needs Arising & Addressed:

The multi-faceted scheme, with delivery based around planned station closures, aimed to provide operational & safety improvements included the re-use of redundant platform buildings, the repair of occupied buildings, platform widening & improvements (access, lighting, shelters, fencing & seating), a new cycle storage building, and re-ordering to create additional parking.

Such a wide-scale scheme of intervention within the sensitive historic environs of the station site, required a sensitive approach to balance needs and aspirations for operational requirements for passenger use & safety with conservation requirements, without compromising the historic site for future generations.

The initial approach was for a detailed understanding of the station site, its history, evolution, setting, survival extent, and its importance. Building & landscape recording exercises & analyses informed significance statements and reviews, which in turn informed discussions & deliberations with the Client & Planners on the scheme development and statutory requirements.

The design, acknowledging a conservation ethos of minimal impact and reversibility, and the consideration of the scale, extent & siting of new materials, to limit damage or devaluation to the integrity of the historic site, retained the sense of place & historic use whilst delivering operational needs.

Clarifications of the extent of consent requirements enabled client pre-planning of key delivery stages. The detailed scheme design followed with schedules of repairs, taken through listed building consent applications, obtained ahead of site delivery programmes.

Delivered to: