The question of whether recent events will have an impact on the design of primary care facilities has yet to be fully evaluated. Whilst the increase in telephone consultations has the potential to lessen visits to GP surgeries, accommodating mass immunisation requires generous and adaptable public spaces.

The impetus continues to replace traditional small GP surgeries with larger medical centres, better located for public transport and offering a wider range of medical consultations, procedures and therapies. The medical centre illustrated, situated in a local shopping centre, has been designed to provide an attractive and secure environment with public areas and private consulting rooms arranged around a central hub.

Retirement accommodation, whether provided for residents who are fully active, with reduced mobility, or requiring extra care, is designed to create a self-contained and active community. The extent of communal facilities will vary with the category and scale of the development, with certain minimum standards.

In the scheme Malcolm Payne Group designed for Michael Blanning Trust Housing Association in Moseley in Birmingham, a high level of amenity is provided for residents of the seventy-two one and two-bedroom apartments. A spacious restaurant is served by a full catering kitchen, a separate bar provides an intimate meeting area. A larger versatile space, ‘the village hall’ can be arranged in different configurations for activities such as parties, events and aerobics.

The ‘public’ rooms open-up with sliding partitions into a wide internal street. An open atrium rises for the full height of the building, providing a visual link between the residential levels and the public areas. The social spaces are complimented by quiet areas in the form of library, meeting and well-being rooms, with a crafts room for hobbyists. A small shop, hairdressing salon and communal laundry serve residents and all the facilities are designed to be available to external visitors.

The apartments surround a large, landscaped courtyard with a terrace for external dining and a gazebo for shade. Ground floor apartments have their own terraces.

The apartments are all equipped with ‘smart technology’ with security and internal communications managed from a tablet computer screen in each apartment. Energy efficiency is provided by a communal heating system with an individual control unit in each apartment. Communal spaces are air-conditioned, powered by photovoltaic solar panels on the roof. Wide corridors are designed to accommodate buggies that can be stored and recharged on each floor and electric charging points are installed in the under-croft car park.

The scheme is managed from a central reception and office, and night staff are accommodated in self-contained studios.  A guest suite is available for visitors. The intention is to recruit students in medicine or care to provide night time cover, and to provide intergenerational activities to reinforce the vibrancy of the community.

The expansion of cinema in the 1920’s contributed a building type that became a focal point in almost every town centre. Many have disappeared, others have been repurposed, and some have been listed as buildings of special architectural and historical importance.

The basic structure was usually functional in design and construction; it was the street façade that presented the visual attraction to passers-by, and the interior that provided an element of fantasy to support the entertainment. Converting such buildings without destroying their significance is a challenge.

One such building in Northampton started life as a mid C19 corn exchange and was converted in succeeding years, first to an assembly hall, and then to a cinema, bingo hall and nightclub. The classical decoration was overlain by various iterations of the latest modern cinema style, and each later conversion destroyed the character of its predecessor. Designated a Grade II listed building, primarily for its historical significance and contribution to the streetscape, the building’s story tracks the vogues in entertainment over the course of C20.

Malcolm Payne Group were tasked with designing a scheme to insert three new upper stories for residential use above ground floor commercial space.  The solution is to erect an independent steel-framed box structure to support the upper levels, to be constructed inside the original brick shell and timber roof structure.

Planning permission was granted for change of use, and listed building consent for the alterations. The scheme envisages a ground floor restaurant with student accommodation on the upper floors, with separate access and means of escape. The stucco decoration on the main façade is proposed to be restored to reestablish the significance of an important element in the backdrop to the Market Square.

The utilitarian rear elevation was originally enclosed by other buildings but has been more recently exposed to public view by demolition and road improvements. The restoration of earlier fenestration and provision of a new entrance to serve the upper stories are proposed to create an attractive rear facade.

Implementation of the scheme will reveal what remain of the layers of alteration and of any original features that contribute to the interest of the historic building.

Vision documents have become the essential method of promoting land for residential development. Clearly, they have an important role in marketing sites, and they have become increasingly valuable in the process of identifying strategic development land at the pre-application stage of the planning process. Their value has greatly increased as the planning system has become more difficult to navigate and public opposition to development has become more organised.

As its name implies the pith of the vison document is in demonstrating that a development proposal is attractive, beneficial and deliverable. It provides a high-level summary of the characteristics of a site in terms of location and amenities, and access and topography; it includes an indicative scheme to illustrate the opportunities that stem from its inherent qualities.

In a planning regime that appears frequently to be targeted at preventing, rather than encouraging development, the vision document must provide a robust justification statement. In this respect it must anticipate potential objections and be underwritten by an analysis of the planning and environmental issues that are inherent in the site. It must show that the balance between the opportunities and constraints is overwhelmingly positive.

The task is to achieve a presentation that delivers factual information in a concise and attractive format that can be circulated both electronically and in hard copy. The document must be sufficiently authoritative to pass scrutiny by planning officers, and easily accessible to the non-professional reader.

From our experience in public consultations and planning inquiries, factual information is frequently misunderstood and architects’ drawings misinterpreted by objectors. The challenge is to distil a large amount of information into an easily comprehensible format and to use a diagrammatic form of illustration wherever possible to communicate urban design concepts.

Working with landowners, developers and housebuilders, Malcolm Payne Group has extensive experience in site analysis, feasibility studies and concept scheme design together with the graphic design, writing and illustration skills necessary to prepare compelling vision documents.