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Ballards Smoke House

Project Details

Within a Conservation Area

Practice

Brightblue Studio

9 Cliffords Fort , NORTH SHIELDS , Tyne and Wear , NE30 1JE

Ballard's Smoke House has marked the north-east corner of Clifford's Fort since 1707. In 2007 Brightblue Studio moved in and have recently been granted planning permission to redevelop the building. Ballard's Smoke House is in a conservation area and within a Scheduled Historic Monument. Following four years of consultation with a wide variety of people and organisations, Brightblue Studio are going to create a multi-use, multi-layered, flexible building as part of the Fish Quay regeneration. It will house a glass sculpture gallery and workshop, an associated art cafe, an architecture studio and an apartment with integrated planting and spaces that can be opened to the outside. It will be an Activhaus building, acting as an exemplar of Brightblue Studio's work – the design emphasis being on integrated glass, underpinned by sustainable practice. The proposal is to re-build Ballard's Smoke House to the form it held through much of the twentieth century, using materials common to the smoke houses in a contemporary manner, though with a lower roof height and less volume, making it more sympathetic to the fabric of the Fish Quay today. The east and south elevations, visible primarily to ferry passengers, will open up, responding to the scale of the sea and also playing an important part in the building's environmental strategy, allowing the interior to benefit from natural light and solar gain.