“A little world of our own,” wrote one Mary Russell Mitford around two centuries ago, about a hamlet called Three Mile Cross in the parish of Shinfield, near Reading in Berkshire. It was, she said in her once-famous book about rural life, Our Village, “close-packed and insulated” like “bees in a hive, or sheep in a fold”. She might struggle to recognise the district now. Some of the “nooks and turns” and “shady lanes and sunny commons” that she described are still there, but so too are junction 11 of the M4, the Thames Valley Science Park (phase II), an expanse of mud awaiting a new supermarket, and the construction sites on which thousands of new homes, directed there by Wokingham borough council in obedience to national government policy, are taking shape. Less than five miles away from Three Mile Cross is the less picturesque Atomic Weapons Establishment at Burghfield.
It’s a microcosm of a certain kind of modern British landscape where Lidl meets idyll, where the logic of travel times and property values and tech investment encounters rural cottages and village greens. With the physical changes goes a social transformation, as the inhabitants of the new areas are typically younger and more diverse than the settled and ageing populations of older, more rustic parts. Many of the newcomers will be attracted here by the affordability, relative to more expensive cities, of homes where they can raise families.
So a town of about 20,000 people is half-accidentally emerging – roughly the size of Ely in Cambridgeshire or Dorchester in Dorset – and while Mitford was able to claim that “we know everyone, are known to everyone [and] interested in everyone”, it now takes more effort to achieve such familiarity. The aim of the £2.9m School Green Centre, designed by the architects AOC, is to offer some of the common ground where connections might be made among Shinfield’s new and old residents.
It is, according to the chair of the parish council, Andrew Grimes, a “coherent cultural and community centre”. “We don’t know who’s moving in,” he says, “or what are their reasons for association”, but the building provides “spaces for whatever their cultural activities might be”. It contains rooms that can be used for exercise, weddings, clubs, council meetings, plus a cafe with a small library attached. On a typical weekday morning you might find parents who’ve just dropped off their children at school, roaming toddlers, older people just passing the time pleasantly.
“It’s really simple,” says Geoff Shearcroft, a partner in AOC who grew up nearby. “What people want is an indoor space that is public.” The practice has some experience of getting such community projects to punch above their weight, for example with the Green in Nunhead, south London and the forthcoming Alkerden Hub in the “garden city” of Ebbsfleet in Kent. They like to take types that people recognise – a gable, a window, a balcony, a house shape – and give them presence with unexpected form and scale. Their Shinfield building is part barn, part secular church, with a long, low roof adjoining a stubby tower.
It is made distinctive with a butterfly roof, whose V-shaped cutout echoes but inverts the triangles of the many pitched roofs hereabouts. It’s a simple but effective device, both familiar and curious, that catches the eye in long and oblique views. The centre addresses the green that it adjoins – a traditional space with war memorial, old primary school and pub turned Co-op – and the wider, somewhat inchoate landscape of housebuilding sites and fragmentary woods. It is finished in white render, a common enough material on the neighbourhood’s cottagey and arts and crafts buildings, but one that sets the new building apart from the ubiquitous reddish brick of the surrounding new housing.
Different volumes and spaces are gathered into the overall form, the interiors animated by a palette of punchy colours – pink, green, yellow – that gather into an impure painted rainbow above the staircase. An older building, renovated to form part of the new facility, is joined with a cloisterish covered connection. A big, high hall for performance, ceremonies and sport rises to the full height of the barn-like roof. The cafe/library opens up through sliding glass walls to an outdoor terrace that will in turn – if an intervening car park currently there is relocated – connect with the green. On the upper floor is a meeting room, its ceiling formed by the underside of the V-shaped roof. An emphatic first-floor balcony looks as if it is designed for civic proclamations that probably won’t happen, but functions as a breakout space for this room.
The design feels relaxed and interconnected within the presence of its overall form. The building does bear constructional scars – some wobbly lines, rough edges and inexact details – as the result of cost limits and the fraught nature of getting something built during Covid. Although it opened last year, ongoing snags have kept AOC from inviting an architecture critic in until now. But it achieves a civic place that feels both proud and available to anyone. Which, as similarly sized Ely has a magnificent cathedral to its name, is the least that Shinfield should expect.
The project was paid for by the mechanisms of a neighbourhood plan, which is an invention of David Cameron’s government intended to sweeten the pill of new development on existing communities, which enables them to spend on public benefits the levies raised on housebuilders when they receive planning permission. Grimes is clear that his parish would rather not have had so many new homes, but that “if we lost the battle we wanted to win the war” – that they would gain, in other words, assets such as the School Green Centre. Two primary schools, enhanced green spaces, sports pitches, a relief road and a temporary bus subsidy (although no increase in GP services) were also part of the deal.
Given the millions in turnover and profit generated by the new housing, it would have been lovely if the budget could have extended to making the details really zing, but the School Green Centre is still an imaginative and thoughtful response to the pressures unleashed by new housing.
