Crawley Town Hall Masterplan

Crawley Town Hall exemplifies how thoughtful design can be leveraged to create high quality buildings that put sustainability and occupant wellbeing at the heart of the design while meeting the long-term commercial goals of all stakeholders.

Matt Willcock, Head of Development, Westrock

Client Westrock and Crawley Borough Council
Location Crawley, London

Services

RIBA stages 1-6
Architectural design
Interior design

We have secured planning permission for a new Town Hall and commercial office building, a new public square and refurbishments to an existing multi-storey car park in Crawley, alongside outline permission for up to 182 new homes and a district energy centre. The new nine-storey Crawley Town Hall, which will front onto The Boulevard and a new landscaped public square, will provide over 4,000sqm customer service and civic office space, including a new Civic Chamber for Crawley Borough Council, with five floors of flexible commercial office space above.

A mixed-use building will sit to the west and north sides of the public square with commercial space to the ground floor in addition to the new housing. Our scheme will create a distinctive, modern and flexible civic office building for the local community, achieve significant savings on the council’s current running costs and improve service delivery. The new facilities being built as part of the masterplan, will transform the town centre and enable the council to benefit from the ability to generate new revenue from commercial office tenants.

“Crawley is defined by its New Town character and our approach has sought to celebrate this while allowing for urban renewal. The new Town Hall will create a vibrant public building fit for the future and bring hundreds of long-term jobs and new homes into the town centre.”

James Pickard, Director, Cartwright Pickard

The architectural approach to the new Town Hall, its facades and the use of materials follows the spirit and architectural lineage of the early modernist buildings that define Crawley’s New Town character. The low-energy building will use precast reconstituted stone panels to express the structural frame with a brick infill panel.

To improve occupant wellbeing and comfort, the proportion of glazing in the facade has been carefully considered at 45% to create optimum internal conditions in terms of daylight and views out, balanced with the need to minimise overheating and glare in summer and excessive heat loss in winter.