Revisiting Feilden Fowles’ factory for Charlie Bigham

It needs the next phase to enclose the space, mediating the scale shift from the buzzing hive of human activity and the domineering presence of the cliffs beyond. Fowles has, of course, already thought of that, working with Bigham on a new kitchen facility, welcome building and middle-scale connecting walkway between.

The factory itself rests calmly on its elevated footing, dual-banded façade in dialogue with the datums of the quarry ridge lines, materials blending with the shifting landscape. The building eschews perspective, sitting proud of the landscape on an off-white podium, meeting the sky with an articulated roof rhythm, tending towards saw-tooth, but not quite.

‘The two biggest buildings in this locality are here and Wells Cathedral – an extraordinary building,’ he says. ‘This space is about the same size and about the same height …. you know, just … coincidentally.’ And the connection between the two spaces? ‘Have you ever been to the Covent Garden Opera House? If you go upstairs, there’s a window, looking over the floral hall. I remember going there just after it reopened and saying: This is quite cool. We must do this.’ And so they have.

Back in 2015, this was a risky endeavour for both parties. Bigham, known for his efforts to raise the bar on ready-made food since establishing his firm in 1996, took a punt on a small practice with a few well-considered education buildings but no industrial experience, and certainly not on this scale. Feilden Fowles’ risk was trusting this smart, savvy businessman to do what he said, and not use them as the friendly face of big industry.

Working with Charlie has been transformational for our practice. It offered an opportunity to scale up conceptual ideas previously applied on smaller £2-3 million education projects, as well as scaling up the studio’s systems and procedures, enabling us to tackle a more complex £20 million project.

With an experienced contractor engaged early on, it was a smart move to lean into the inevitable system design constraints, massaging grids and forms to better serve the people inside the building. Even the contractor’s Fordist mentality of ‘you can use any material, as long as it’s Kingspan’ was absorbed, considered and then tweaked, slightly – ‘even the timber panelling is an embellishment of a standard system, bending the rules just a little bit,’ says Fowles.

‘Yeah, I think it’s great!’

The core conclave are constantly revising their big vision to share with new team members. Bigham seems amused by other people’s struggle to adopt his affable magnanimity. ‘Every now and again we get someone new in here, and they say “well you could just put a mezzanine in that double-height space, use that for some storage”. And I always think: how do you really not get it?’

Publicist Claire Curtice remembers the hunt for what Charlie calls ‘a little bit of magic’. ‘We looked at lots of sites that were all grassy triangles between three roads,’ she says, ‘but then we came here and kind of had to break into the site… I remember looking at Charlie and thinking “this is going to be the one”.’

The gold-rush aesthetic is a wry yet consistent motif throughout the project. It began with Feilden Fowles’ research into the site’s history, analysing the irregular, ad-hoc structures built to house industrial machinery and the human behaviours around them. This whimsical honesty of form and materiality has been reinterpreted by Fowles and his team, into a method for teasing out every moment of joy from the synthesis of a linear production process, stringent hygiene requirements and the kindness needed to sustain a hand-crafted process.

It seems to have paid off, both initially and in the long run. The iterating of the brief fostered a long-term working relationship between architect, contractor and client. Fowles is clear that their ‘strategic small wins’ were largely possible because Bigham was in their corner the entire time. For Bigham, it was about giving the team space to flourish.

Our appointment by Bighams in 2016 presented a shift in scale and building type for our fledgling practice. We were a little in awe of Charlie’s ambition to create a thriving food production campus from scratch on a former aggregate quarry, with no evidence of any services. Twenty months later, the first dish emerged from the kitchen.

‘Whereas I’ve just said we must wash it off! Clean all the roofs! We’ve done all the others but this one is bloody hard to get to. But you’re liking that?’

The project’s ambition is subtle, evident mostly in curated moments of architectural flair: the timber entrance ‘folly’, the ‘heroic space’ where ingredients are assembled into meals, and the staff canteen that looks on to it. Even as he points out dust gathering in the roof apex, or finishes that haven’t withstood repeat pummellings from forklift trucks, Bigham has a glint in his eye when talking about the architectural agenda of his facility.

‘I do think the world would be a better place if more people used architects,’ he says. ‘Obviously, the qualifier for that is: good architects. There is such a misunderstanding in the construction sector about what architecture is. The default position is “we don’t want to use them”, and I do think the architecture profession is quite bad at selling itself … It’s not just about the building and its function, it’s the social role that architecture plays.’

We intend to develop a lower carbon/low-tech construction method for future phase buildings. The sheer pace of the first phase limited the ability to be more experimental. The management contractor TSL, which specialises in large-scale production buildings, had specific supply chains to deliver defined construction systems (steel frame, composite panels) exceptionally quickly. In the future we want to be more courageous and push more radically sustainable construction methods, such as timber or composite timber/steel frame construction, combined with bio-based cladding approaches.

Charlie pauses to consider. ‘But you see, Ed, it reduces the lifespan of the roof, which is not good from a sustainability point of view.’

Today, Feilden Fowles’ pervading interest in what Fowles calls the ‘real nature of materials’ is evident throughout the building. We circle around it, first at high level on the old quarry access road, then at low level in the dormant wildflower meadow, taking in the shifting sunlight as it illuminates the ridged cladding, complementing the flashes of yellow, burgundy and violet in the marbled quarry walls behind.

‘I don’t think we’ll go radically different,’ he says. ‘We want to put the buildings in dialogue with each other and the courtyard.’ This means setting out the new building perpendicular to the existing, obeying the golden rule of staying south of the east-west centre line, and sequestering the parking away from pedestrian and cycle access. So if you’re a visitor, ‘you’d be dropped off at the west end, walk up the ramp to the entrance building, another kind of folly. Then you walk along this street, which lets you look on every stage of the process. You get the tour even as you’re arriving.’ It’s gentle showmanship, absorbing the first building into the context alongside the original quarry walls.

An evident draw for Bigham, even when some big names offered to work for free. ‘It was very flattering who wanted to work with us,’ he says. ‘But I think if we’d worked with Hopkins, we’d have got their building, not ours.’

I’m not sure subservient is the word for the muscular mass we approach. Deferential perhaps – though equal in stature, the factory is out-loomed by the impressively rugged and richly seamed quarry walls. There are faint calls from the peregrine falcon nest in the north-west ridge, and I can’t shake the feeling that we should have arrived on horseback, pistols ready.

In addition to the delivery of the phase 2 dispatch building, we plan to support Bighams with other aspects of the site masterplan, including enhancements to the quarry landscape, ecology and biodiversity. As the site grows into a campus of multiple production buildings, we hope to deliver the first pavilion in the landscape, to house staff canteen and welfare facilities. We are very fortunate to be working with an organisation that values design, taking a long-term and holistic view of their buildings and the responsible land management of their unique natural setting.
Edmund Fowles, director, Feilden Fowles

The tower, however, was driven by Feilden Fowles, a combination of providing an entrance sequence that didn’t interrupt production and indicated human scale on such a vast building. After ‘getting really into it, with a tonne of models pushing and pulling the form’, the resulting articulated timber encasement is itself a candidate for a portrait by Hilla and Bernd Becher.

Right from the start, Feilden Fowles set itself apart from the invited shortlist by establishing an open dialogue with Bighams. The practice’s willingness to hear the client out, test ideas collectively and dig around for alternative inspiration for its poetic pragmatism seems to have fostered an amiable, even familial, relationship. It’s distinctive in the way they speak to each other, and in the jovial atmosphere at the factory.

As we leave and I reflect on the infrastructural scale and future ambition of this project, it occurs to me that the project is a mirror of Bigham himself. Thanks to Feilden Fowles’ gentle experimentation, pushing the envelope of what is possible, this building does what it says on the wood-lined packet.

Percentage of floor area with daylight factor >2% Not calculated
Percentage of floor area with daylight factor >5% Not calculated
On-site energy generation 6% from 320kW PV array (906 panels). Reduction of 57 tCO2 per annum
Total energy load Total for building and production processes  1,945 kWh/m²
Carbon emissions (all) Building only 21.2 kgCO2eq/m² (TER modelled all including production processes  at 364 kgCO2eq/m²)
Annual mains water consumption Not calculated
Airtightness at 50Pa Not calculated
Overall thermal bridging heat transfer coefficient (Y value) Not calculated
Overall area-weighted U-value 0.195 W/m²K
Embodied / whole-life carbon Not calculated
Design life 50 years

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‘Yeah, I do quite like it.’

‘So you might be rather liking that we’re getting this mossy roof?’

Again, while the form supports pragmatics like a lift, stairs and a meeting room, the arrival sequence is elevated with playful details, hinting at the joviality within. For Fowles, expressing the wind of the stair, cutting out windows to direct your gaze between factory and quarry wall, or staggering the profiles of the timber cladding to play with perspective are all traces of former Feilden Fowles architect Elli Farrant’s ‘style and sensibility’ – another joyous layer in the extended timeline of the site.

The structural grid and materiality negotiates two rhythms: a garnet aluminium super-grid to house the 24-hour production line; and a diminutive, framed timber bay for diurnal, human activities. The closer we get, the more the building reveals its edges – nibbled in places, sprouting at others – a living beast, toiling happily in its crater.

 

Project data

Five years after the building completed, an exhausted limestone quarry that once looked like the surface of Mars, is now an Elysium field with wildflowers, a swale and a wooded grove concealing a secondary access route. Well, not right now it isn’t – the flowers won’t re-emerge for another few months, which Fowles concedes makes it look ‘like a bit of a miserable sports field’, and Bighams has just coppiced out the fledgling forest to give fewer trees more room to flourish, leaving the corpses of the fallen strewn over the quarry’s south bank.

‘When you employ someone who you think is brilliant at what they do, you have to let them be brilliant,’ he says. ‘You can’t say: I’m going to employ you to make an amazing building, but I’m going to tell you what it’s going to look like.’ He seems unaware of how radical a stance that is.

A striking theme of this project is the fusion between romance and pragmatism

Yet, as a factory, a workplace, a rewilding masterplan or an experiment in new industrial romanticism, it is gently moving the needle, questioning our assumptions about ‘efficiency’ and ‘value’. Without drama, urgency or accusation, this building is an invitation to observe the state of the natural and industrial world, and reconsider what we believe the reasonable minimum should be.
Hayley Chivers is a senior architect at Buckley Gray Yeoman, a Design Council expert and founder of the Vers Collective

Architect’s view

Fowles, Chivers and Bigham in the quarry