SAINTS GO MARCHING IN

After years of failed plans and dashed hopes, the latest strategy to resuscitate St Athan military base with a £12bn Defence Technical College for all three forces is confident of overcoming local scepticism.

Words Jan Carlos Kucharek | Images Scott Brownrigg/Capita

Visiting the central London offices of the Metrix consortium, charged with the £12bn procurement of the new Defence Technical College (DTC) at St Athan in the Vale of Glamorgan, which received planning permission late last year, was a most unnerving experience. Behind the doors of its faux classical facade, the visitor is greeted with four full-height columns of thick, green (and, presumably, bullet-proof) circular glass ‘airlock’ doors. Users key in a code, enter, are sealed in momentarily while they key in another, before inner doors open to allow access to the lobby. It makes a visit to Metrix’s office feel like an episode of Mission Impossible.

When I say ‘office’, I mean it in the loosest sense of the word. There’s a door, a floorplate, and a large number of desks, a few occupied by staff on laptops. And that’s it. No storage, no filing cabinets, no trite but endearing attempts at the personalisation of space. You get the sense that in an emergency, everyone would calmly get up and leave with nothing but their laptops and the clothes they arrived in – like a ditched plane – and just set up somewhere else.

But while this ‘leave no trace’ approach might be a tried and tested military intelligence strategy, it is the diametric opposite of what the consortium claims to be trying to achieve at St Athan, a few miles west of the seaside town of Barry in south Wales. And so it should be, because until now, the former RAF site seems to have been sold short on promises of its regeneration.

The base opened in 1938 and was occupied initially by the RAF’s No 4 School of Technical Training, followed by a fighter group pool, maintenance unit and school of air navigation, establishing the site’s role as a training and defence logistics centre. It survived Luftwaffe bombings but was less fortunate with Margaret Thatcher’s Front Line First streamlining of defence services in the 1980s, when facilities at UK bases were put out to private tender. The civilian consortium, Defence Aviation Repair Agency (DARA) took over the site in 1999. To ensure its long-term presence and local employment, the Welsh authorities and the Ministry of Defence initiated the £134m ‘Red Dragon’ project, to procure land and build a state-of-the-art ‘super-hangar’ to support the MoD’s strategy for the centralisation of fast-jet repair at St Athan. However, in 2005, after a review recommending that bigger savings could be made by keeping air-support services at different locations, the MoD used its five-year opt-out clause, announcing that DARA would close in 2007. In 2009 the National Audit Office for Wales went on record as being highly critical of how the deal was managed, the effect of which was job losses for the local community, and a total cost to the taxpayer of £113m to build a redundant hangar and initiate the Welsh Assembly’s Aerospace Business Park. The red dragon turned out to be a white elephant.

So for most of the local residents, especially those in the neighbouring St Athan village, who have been let down so badly, the proposed DTC is receiving a cautious welcome. When it completes in 2015, it will be the first and the biggest of a new kind of vocational training operation to centralise cross-forces technical and logistical training in the country – the £12bn Metrix PPP/PFI project is set to provide those services for the next 30 years. The consortium consists of a number of big players – Sodexo delivering the estate proposition, Qinetiq and Raytheon Systems Ltd supplying defence evaluation and logistics, with education provided by the Open University, Nord Anglia Education and City and Guilds, which will also validate the courses taught there. And lined up to deliver the construction of the £700m housing enclave for 3,000 forces students, along with training facilities, medical block, administrative centre, mess halls, sports facilities, multi-faith centre and museum is contractor Laing O’Rourke, with design carried out by Capita Architecture and Scott Brownrigg, and landscaping by HLM Architects. Executive design consultancy for Metrix is also being provided by HLM.

The fact that three commercial architects are involved in the design gives an indication of the scale of the project. At 360ha, the new DTC is set to cover more ground than the neighbouring village. Work has therefore been duly apportioned, with Capita set up to design the training facilities and Scott Brownrigg the residential component. Overseeing all this, Chris Liddle, Chairman of HLM architects explains his firm’s role as ensuring that the diverse building designs will meet the objectives of the broader ‘vision’. To this end, HLM is employed to oversee the ‘aesthetic development review board’, representing the interests of the client, and ensuring the design team employs a homogenous design approach, from individual buildings through to the whole masterplan. As Metrix design and construction director Alistair Page explains, this is all the more important because the three forces are being brought together for the first time. ‘This is a tri-service establishment,’ he explains. ‘The RAF, Royal Navy and the British Army all have their own history, culture and ethos. We feel that it’s important that we don’t lose the individuality of the services in the design.’

Forming the centre of the proposed DTC is the Red Dragon hangar, one of the largest covered spaces in Europe. Now lying empty, it’s set to be retrofitted with a mezzanine level to accommodate the increased amount of military hardware that’s going to need to fit inside it to meet the maintenance training needs of all the services. Imagine the hangar as the blunt end of the training wedge, the place where all the theory gets put into practice. But augmenting this will be the 90 or so buildings that together will define the training and residential parts of the college. HLM’s Chris Liddle says the basis of the masterplan is the need to easily orientate oneself in the massive site.

‘Our idea from the outset was to separate “noisy and dirty” areas from the “quiet and clean’’,’ he explains. ‘In terms of organisation, we have a formal linear route that runs past the hangar encompassing the college training facilities, leading to the parade ground, bands and HQ building. At 90 degrees to this is the less formal Heritage Park, supporting the residential accommodation set into the landscape, and the military house office.’

At the end of this snaking route will be the senior accommodation and a separate mess for senior NCOs and officers. The look of this residential area might be relatively informal on plan, but it is all pinned back to the ‘military house office’, the senior accommodation block and mess, and the linear processional route to the HQ, a point highlighted by Mike Warren of Scott Brownrigg when he adds: ‘We have to meet the need for command and control, but overarching that is that it is a good place to live and work. Our aim is to create a community.’

And whether the design encourages it or not, the DTC is going to have to behave as one. As a high-security complex, the site is officially defined by whether it is inside or outside ‘the wire’. Thus ‘phase 2’ and more senior ‘phase 3’ trainees, staying for anything from 14 weeks to 18 months will be ‘inside’, whereas military trainers, their families and a large number of the 2000 support staff will be ‘outside’. Given the relatively transient nature of the former, engendering a sense of community and belonging is a design team priority. ‘We wanted the design of the residential areas to be almost collegiate in feel,’ says Mike Warren, talking of the ribs of accommodation that curl off the Heritage Park spine. All these will contain four-man dorms connected by common space and kitchens, and single-man en suite studio rooms for higher-level trainees.

Warren acknowledges that some trainees may come from backgrounds that mean the DTC will be their first example of a stable and ordered domestic environment. This is reflected in internal arrangements that seem simple and clear. There remains, though, an unrelenting and banal quality to the rendered exterior facades of the blocks as presented, especially when they are to be replicated over a sizeable portion of the site, and an aspect that may merit further internal design review.

Just as much an issue will be the formal language of the military buildings – the HQ and bands building, the senior accommodation and mess, and especially the military house office. This last is a true conundrum, as having one building representing the navy, airforce, Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers and Royal Signals is without precedent. Page states that the building, placed in the middle of the Heritage Park, and a muster area, ‘is within a key zone of visual influence and that its language should reflect that position’. So far, sketch studies have indicated that the building has four entrances, and will make allowance for individual expression outside – a mast here, a Spitfire there. BREEAM-excellent ratings, stone facing and colonnades aside, this is a unique opportunity to create a new expression for the changing nature of our armed forces in the modern world. Business park architecture simply won’t cut it. 
Despite the desire of the consortium to make the new DTC part of the community, security concerns remain paramount, and ‘the wire’ will form a clear boundary between the trainees, who will have social facilities within it, and the local community. Liddle acknowledges that the site ‘will have to cater for downtime as well as work time’, ensuring that bars, clubs and other social facilities stay very much on site. But moves have been made to encourage interaction between the two communities via the new leisure facility that will be situated outside the DTC, and that will be partially funded by government money. This, as well as the upkeep of the St Brise church dating from the 13th century at the new entrance to the site, a community centre and crèche, and the Royal Engineers Museum, while not technically a Section 106 contribution is, says Metrix’s Page, a ‘contribution in kind – it’s a community facility, but it will have to work with the new training college’. Outside the wire too, will be environmental mitigation for newt and bat populations displaced by the new development.

While concerns for the local pond life seem to have been addressed, those at the higher end of the evolutionary chain are outstanding, with Stephen Thomas, director of the Welsh Centre for International Affairs, remaining dubious about the DTC. Smarting from the Red Dragon hangar debacle, he says: ‘If you look at the fine print, Metrix has been exemplary in its approach, but there are bigger issues than the newt population. What are the real social and broader environmental impacts?’

Thomas’ beef is with defence training being outsourced to a private consortium in principle, and in particular to a partner such as Raytheon, a firm which makes military missiles among much else. It is also with the overdue Strategic Defence Review, which he believes will conclude ‘that troop numbers will be cut by 2020, with less MoD staff being trained and the DTC shortfall being filled by foreign armies’. That said, he concedes that ‘we believe the DTC is more likely to happen than the Welsh Assembly’s Aerospace Business Park which has no certainty, no contracts, and no commercial commitment from anyone’.
Jill Evans, Plaid Cymru MP and MEP for Wales, claims she has been vilified for her pacifist stance and for her opposition to the privatisation of armed forces training. ‘This development has been sold to Wales in terms of its job creation,’ she remarks. ‘Five thousand jobs have been promised, but that is positively not going to happen. The trade unions have been informed that with the centralisation of training provision, their jobs will be safe; therefore there will be limited opportunities for local employment – will these be professional, or cleaners and cooks on the minimum wage?’ Evans claims to have figures quoted to her from the deputy first minister for Wales that are a lot lower than those being stated in the media.

But detractors aside, the DTC received planning permission last October, and the next five years will see the design turned into a reality. And having overcome local objections, the Metrix design team is excited at the prospect. It is, after all, creating a training facility on a scale that has never been seen before in the UK.

‘With the whole complex we want to create intimate, family qualities on the site while maintaining a sense of the formal, like a country estate – like Chatsworth House,’ says Chris Liddle. A noble aspiration, and with £400m a year of taxpayers’ money for the next 30 years going in to build and run the DTC, Wales – like England – expects.