A larch clad covered walkway leads from the main entrance into the heart of the school’s campus and encloses three sides of a previously under-utilised courtyard. Visually uniting the disparate buildings and external spaces, the walkways give coherence to the school by establishing a clear hierarchy of routes, improving orientation and bringing focus back onto the sheltered central courtyard, a shared amenity that can be used to meet, reflect, study and dine.

A new full-size, timber-lined sports hall is flooded with natural light from the tall translucent band of clerestory polycarbonate that runs around all four sides. Above the changing rooms a ‘market place’ has been created in collaboration with the artist Catherine Greig. A series of shops along the circulation route linking the courtyard to the playground, provide space for enterprising students to set up small businesses selling produce to their peers during school breaks.

Internally, the narrow corridors have been broken up to enable the circulation areas to expand, creating breakout areas to provide informal learning spaces, reduce congestion, increase passive supervision and allow daylight into the space. All classrooms have been re-configured to aid modern teaching techniques with new services coordinated throughout.

The new interventions create a strong identity for the school, distinct from the existing fabric, yet carefully integrated to unify the whole campus. The choice of timber is multi-layered: it provides an attractive, robust, maintenance free enclosure, and its organic nature contrasts with the tough urbanity of the surrounding buildings, softening the existing campus to create a sheltered collegiate atmosphere.