Case study - Two emergency facilities that had to share a building

Two services, one plan

Fire and police stations are usually separate buildings for good reasons. They have different response patterns, different vehicle movements, different security requirements and different relationships with the public. A fire appliance needs an unobstructed run to the road. A custody suite needs the opposite of that.

Integrating both into one facility means resolving those conflicts in plan rather than deferring them to operations. Where the two services share — welfare, training, plant, parking — and where they must be entirely separate. Which entrance the public uses, and which they must never find.

Delivered as a pair

Two stations at 3,563 m² and 3,297 m², designed together. Close enough in scope that a common approach was justified, different enough in site and requirement that neither was a copy of the other.

Design and review at the same time

The asset development role ran design delivery and design review in parallel — authoring these two facilities while reviewing submissions from other consultants across the programme.

Doing both is useful. Reviewing other people’s work makes you a more honest author, because you have spent the week seeing exactly how a submission fails: the standard that was cited but not met, the coordination that was promised for the next stage and never arrived, the drawing that answers a different question from the one asked.