Retrofitting the Castle Meadow campus, Nottingham

The award-winning 1990s buildings at Castle Meadow, Nottingham, which previously served as offices for HM Revenue and Customs, have been repurposed and transformed for the future as a University of Nottingham campus. The structural engineer had an influential role on the project to define the principles for retrofitting the existing buildings. The differing levels of retrofit, including a complex tensile-fabric roof replacement, have given the site a new lease of life, demonstrating that existing buildings and spaces can be innovatively transformed and reused using a variety of approaches. These buildings set the benchmark for low-carbon developments in Nottingham, with an embodied carbon of 80kgCO2e/m2 for the central building works.