Thumbs-up for giant Kent school campus

The scheme in Ebbsfleet Garden City to be one of Kent’s largest-ever educational facilities. The Alkerden CoE Academy will be one of Kent’s largest educational campuses when it opens in 2023.

Lee Evans Partnership has been given the green light for a new education campus in Ebbsfleet Garden City, Kent.

Occupying an 11.1ha site, the 2,200-place Alkerden CoE Academy campus will be one of Kent’s largest educational facilities.

The proposals for landowner and developer Henley Camland will see a nursery, primary school and secondary school built at the emerging town, which is situated on former industrial land by the Thames estuary.

The scheme also includes a community sports centre with outdoor pitches, a sports hall, a dance studio, fitness suite and cafe with enough space to support 500 visitors at any one time.

The planning officer’s report described the scheme’s design as “exemplary”, calling the architecture “carefully considered, richly referencing local colours, textures and agricultural built forms”.

It added that it “balances the security and safeguarding needs of a modern school with the ambition to use the buildings to open up visual connections with the community and frame surrounding streets”.

Last month, architect BPTW was given the go-ahead for 532-home plans to build a series of terraced houses and apartment blocks in Ebbsfleet Garden City.

Lee Evans Partnership’s green light follows the completion of its designs for the 1,105-place Simon Langton Girls’ Grammar school, also in Kent, earlier this year.

The school, which required the flattening of the school’s former art deco premises which were built in the early 1950s, was part of the government’s £4.4bn Priority Schools Building Programme 2.

Source: Building Design