Nottingham Civic Society - Hopkins Architects

The recent front page story in the Evening Post announcing the proposed £900 million development of part of Nottingham’s East Side - the extended Boots Island site, now known as The Island - with Hopkins Architects as the master planners led me to reflect on the impact of Hopkins on Nottingham. As Bill Taylor, partner and director of the practice expressed it to me ‘Nottingham has been good for us, but it’s fair to say we’ve been good for Nottingham.’ Sometime in the late eighties I reflected on the paucity of good buildings erected in Nottingham since 1945 and asked several friends to prepare a list. After some scratching around I think collectively we broke into double figures by bending the rules and allowing in The Church of the Good Shepherd on Thackeray’s Lane, Woodthorpe. I would suggest the arrival of Hopkins, in particular, has changed matters.

Michael Hopkins (born 1935) trained at the Architectural Association, as did his wife Patty. He was a partner in Foster Associates 1969-75 and on leaving formed Michael Hopkins and Partners in 1976. The practice moved to new premises they had designed at Broadley Terrace, Marylebone, in 1984. Extended 1993-94 the site has developed as an office campus incorporating drawing studios, offices and a model shop. The practice has become one of the largest architectural firms in the UK, with a staff approaching 100. It has evolved from Michael Hopkins & Partners, as we knew them when they won the Inland Revenue competition in 1992, into Hopkins Architects. Although perhaps not so well known as the Richard Rogers Partnership or Foster Associates, Hopkins Architects are well respected nationally both as architects and planners. Their contribution to architecture has been recognised with numerous design awards, the RIBA’s Royal Gold Medal in 1995, and a knighthood for Michael Hopkins.

Their claim to have pioneered from the start ‘a series of strategies including fabric roofs, lightweight structures, energy efficient design, weaving new structures into existing ones, and recycling brown land’ has certainly been confirmed by their work in Nottingham, both for the Inland Revenue and the University of Nottingham.

The first project, 1975-76, was the architect’s own house, a light steel frame clad with frameless glass and silver profiled steel sheeting erected in a London conservation area. It received a RIBA award in 1977 and a Civic Trust award in 1979. Thereafter a portfolio of impressive clients was built up. Hopkins’s approach has been called, by an untraced commentator, ‘the acceptable face of modernism’.

Their first building, which captured the public’s imagination, was the Mound Stand at Lord’s Cricket Ground, 1984-87, erected for the MCC’s Bicentenary. Here an ingenious structural solution allowed two extra tiers to be added above the existing Mound Stand. This was topped by one of the first large scale fabric roofs – ‘the counterpart of the marquee at a village fête’. This building was subsequently often referred to as the ancestor of the Amenity Building on Nottingham’s Inland Revenue site.

Later work includes the David Mellor Cutlery Factory, built on a disused gasometer base in the Peak District National Park (1988-89); the acclaimed remodelling of the former Financial Times building, now Bracken House, London (1987-92); Glyndebourne Opera House (1989-94); Westminster Underground Station (Jubilee Line) (1990-99); New Parliamentary Building, Westminster (1989-00); The Forum, Norwich, that City’s Millennium Centre (1996-01 - what I hoped the Nottingham Ice Centre would resemble); and the GEK Construction Company’s headquarters in Athens (2000-03). I should add a project of personal interest, the Rose Bowl cricket arena for Hampshire County Cricket club on the outskirts of Southampton (1994-00).

The Nottingham schemes from the practice are: the Inland Revenue Centre (1992-94) on a derelict canal side industrial site; the Jubilee Campus, University of Nottingham, on the site of a late Raleigh cycle factory (1996-99); the National College for School Leadership, University of Nottingham (2000-02) adjoining the Jubilee Campus, on the former Sturmey Archer site; and an extension to the Portland Building and the creation of an atrium between the new and the original Portland Buildings (2002-03). It would perhaps be rather churlish to mention their unsuccessful bid (2003-04) to redesign Nottingham’s Market Square – but I would consider them runners up!

As planners the practice has undertaken the regeneration of the Northgate area of Chester, and produced master plans for the historic centre of Bury St. Edmunds and the city centre in Hull.

I recently attended a presentation by the architects of their proposals for The Island, which I considered excellent and a model of its kind. They had certainly done their homework on Nottingham and incorporated this appreciation of the grain of the city into their presentation. As with the lines of sight of the Castle in their Inland Revenue layout so here was consideration given to the importance of seeing St. Mary’s on High Pavement – and hopefully at the next stage St. Stephen’s in Sneinton.

Ken Brand
August 2004

HOPKINS ARCHITECTS