Over the course of six years we have been client advisors to Crawley Borough Council during the redevelopment of the Town Hall site to replace the low-rise 1960’s buildings with an entirely new 9-storey Civic Office, a new public square, public realm improvements, significant amount of new housing with ground floor commercial space for a restaurant/café and a district energy centre.
Our role was extended to workplace consultants and interior designers on the council’s own civic use element within the wider commercial development early on. We worked with the Council, their development partner and the wider master planning team, including our sister company, Cartwright Pickard, to ensure civic requirements would be included in the design and build contract.
We were asked to share ‘best practice’ and ‘lessons learnt’ from our experience in the public sector, analyse the council’s organisational structure and utilisation/vacancy statistics. We worked closely with the Council’s departments to help define and formulate their needs. We consulted with senior management team, HR and customer services directors and undertook a staff consultation process in order to enable us to formulate the new brief for a re-imagined and consolidated workplace. We also facilitated internal communications to help the staff understand the new building and the workplace strategy.
Our proposals achieved cabinet approval and were used as the basis of the council accommodation fit-out. Alongside the workplace and interior design service, we assisted the council in their role as client, reviewing and commenting on the evolving design through the design and build process, monitoring progress to ensure that the brief and employer’s requirements were met by the design team.
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