Learning from: Grange Pavilion in Cardiff – ADC

When I finally visited Grange Pavilion earlier this year it was at the end of a decade of hard work for all those involved, and for me raised the question of how we should value and place more importance on the generosity and time invested by communities, client and design team from the outset of a project.

Grange Pavilion is a community-led and owned facility located in a small park in Grangetown, a district in Cardiff which is home to nearly 20,000 residents and one of Wales’s most ethnically diverse electoral wards, with high levels of deprivation. It started with a conversation back in 2012 between local residents expressing an interest in doing something about a vacant and deteriorating bowls pavilion in a popular neighbourhood park and developed into an extraordinary community project that took nearly a decade to realise.

For me, the project’s process and emphasis on social value is an important one and I recall Mhairi McVicar, whom I taught with at Cardiff University and who was heavily involved in the Pavilion project, telling me that her defining moment in the project was the reason given for a failed grant application, which suggested that while the Pavilion would demonstrate significant social value, it would not necessarily demonstrate value for money. The build costs were considered too high and should be half the cost of building luxury flats.

For Mhairi this begged the question of why luxury flats are considered more valuable when they are for the few and a community building is for the many. So with her academic hat on, the question of how we define and measure value is what Mhairi and the architecture students she teaches at Cardiff University set out to explore, and which I have been lucky to follow through my own involvement with their course unit.

First a little background, the pavilion project was delivered via a Community Asset Transfer (CAT) which came forth from a backdrop of austerity cuts and the formation of the Big Society’s Localism Act in 2011. This saw the empowerment of communities to take an active role in shaping their neighbourhoods which supported the notion of volunteerism. This is a big ask by anyone’s standards, and the amount of pro bono time that is required from both the community and the professional team to deliver such a project can be huge. This is borne out by the staggering amount of emails, workshops, meetings, and number of people involved on the pavilion project, which was meticulously catalogued by the students as part of their project research.

What is interesting about the pavilion project is how they overcame this expectation that people should give their time for free and how value was placed on their input. This was achieved when a group of university academics pitched a business case to Cardiff University to fund and set up a partnership with the Grangetown community.

The pitch was successful and saw the formation of Community Gateway, an engagement programme unique to Cardiff University, which initially funded the project’s first three-year phase enabling the community and university to build relationships and formulate a clear strategy to apply for the CAT. University students were seen as ambassadors and it was primarily the architecture students that helped set up a series of workshops, events and meetings to initiate the collaboration. Community Gateway not only funded the engagement process but also, importantly, paid for the early appointment of key people, including a much needed community representative, Ali Abdi.

Mhairi took on the role of project lead placing her on the client side rather than on the design team which she ordinarily would be on, given her training as a qualified architect. As such, she and the team were well placed to establish what was needed from an architect: not just delivering a vision but also providing the community with someone in whom they could develop a long term trusting relationship.

Dan Benham Architects and IBI Group were appointed and filled this role very well – this is apparent in some wonderful moments in the building, which I think capture the richness of the community ambition and involvement. Two of many I could mention are the use of familiar forms, such as the garden wall and pitching roofs that add to the comfortable fit the pavilion has to its physical context, and the perforated Corten steel screen whose pattern was designed by young people from the community.

With the building work completed in 2020, Covid lockdowns meant a stop-start beginning but now the pavilion is in full use and clearly popular, born out by the ongoing post-occupancy assessment initially started by the architecture students. They based it on the RIBA’s Social Value Toolkit, which Flora Samuel devised to quantify the social impact of a building. The result of the students’ work is an amazing visual and factual document that measures people’s qualitative experiences of the Pavilion. And working on a live project has also equipped students with non-architectural skill sets that have enabled them to better communicate with and respect other people’s input.

So what lessons can we take from the Grange Pavilion project? I often find myself saying Wales leads the way on many important social issues and that is certainly the case here. The Future Generation Act has made a big contribution to the way in which social value is defined, with the public sector having to demonstrate the long-term value of their actions and how it will improve the lives of future generations. Grange Pavilion has shown how these values can be implemented in a real project and is an excellent inspiration for others to follow. The partnership model flagshipped by Cardiff University is another example, and the initial engagement process has subsequently led to a much longer-term role that the university can play in the process. Perhaps this is a model that could see more universities collaborating on community projects. The time that has been invested by the community, client and design team is incredible and the added value that a long-term collaboration such as this can create is clear.

But what I think we can really learn here is the mechanisms that can be put in place to take pressure off volunteering and pro bono work and to properly value the investment in people and engagement processes early on and throughout. What could have been a project that played on people’s generosity has instead become a project that values their generosity.