Masterplanning • Birmingham Smithfield

A new landmark building in the heart of the Birmingham Smithfield masterplan, providing leisure, retail, and homes—with wellbeing as its DNA

The Wellbeing Hub was designed for a prominent gateway site at the entrance to the Birmingham Smithfield masterplan. Occupying a plot at the junction of Upper Dean Street and the new Upper Smithfield Walk, the challenge was to provide an extraordinary mix of uses within a single building on a highly constrained site.

Smithfield is a joint venture between developer Lendlease and Birmingham City Council. RCKa was selected through invited competition to design a new building for Plot 4A-1 of the wider masterplan as part of a team comprising dRMM, Haworth Tompkins, David Kohn Architects and Prior + Partners. Working alongside the P+P team we developed the detailed design for our plot at the same time the outline masterplan was being developed.

Our plot contains an extraordinary mix of uses: a public house, and a basketball court; a rooftop dining room and a destination spa. In the rear service yard there is

and a retail frontage; gyms, coffee shop and 165 new homes–bound together with

165 new homes with a net-to-gross ratio of ***%

Some stats here

***sqft of leisure space across two floors

Client
Lendlease / Birmingham City Council

Status
Hybrid Masterplan Approved

Project Team
Tony Staples
Andrea Villate
Russell Curtis
Tom Hart
Anna Crew

Collaborators
Intervention Architecture

Wider Team
David Kohn Architects
dRMM
Field Operations
Haworth Tompkins
Prior + Partners

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