Clore Learning Centre and World Heritage Centre Grand Opening
21 June 2022
The official opening of the Clore Learning Centre and Bath World Heritage Centre was a real milestone and is a valuable addition for the City of Bath.
Enthusiastic staff gave us a well informed tour of the new building, which provides interpretation about Bath as a UNESCO World Heritage site and multi use education spaces for schools and local community groups, before speeches and reception were held around the atmospheric Roman Baths.
The project is a great example of imaginative reuse of existing listed buildings. Before being given a new lease of life the buildings were run down and had low value uses. Through working with the existing structure they have been sympathetically altered for a new use. The most interesting engineering aspect was the roof top extension. This is in the location of a former cast iron water tank. Integral were able to determine the historic water level in the cast iron tank from scale marks on the inside. This allowed us to calculate the maximum load the building had seen during its lifetime from the tank. With the tank removed we were able to use this load allowance to support the new roof top extension ensuring the loads remained below those of the former tank and also followed the same load path. The roof top extension room is now aptly named The Water Tank.
