Top industry awards for the teams behind the Waterside Campus

The University of Northampton’s Estates Services Team received top industry recognition from the Association of University Directors of Estates (AUDE) at a glittering awards ceremony which took place last night (16 April 2019).

The Estate Services and First Degree Facilities team were highly commended in the Estates and Facilities Team of the Year category. John Howes, External Services Manager was also highly commended in the Emerging Talent category, for his focus on social inclusion and health and wellbeing within his team and throughout the wider department.

The Waterside Campus Development won the AUDE University Impact Initiative of the Year Award. Terry Neville, Chief Operating Officer at the University of Northampton, said: “We are delighted to have won the University Impact Initiative of the Year Award. Waterside has been a mammoth undertaking over seven years and has resulted in a neglected brownfield site being transformed into a massively successful and impressive new campus which is a credit to all of those involved, the University and Northampton itself. The project hasn’t simply been a new campus development but has facilitated a radical re-engineering of the institution in terms of both teaching methodology and governance structures.”

This award recognises the seven-year journey from the conception of the campus development to when the campus opened last summer. The campus development brief emphasised integration – of the University into the town and local community, and of departments, facilities and teams within the University itself. New pedestrian and road bridges and cycle routes now link the site to the town, with public facilities and commercial outlets part of a waterside experience which continues beyond the University to local historic buildings and parks. Shared working spaces for staff teams and flexible cross-site working help to break down internal barriers. As a learning environment, virtually any on-site space can be used as a teaching/learning space. The majority of buildings on campus received the ‘EPC A’ rating for energy efficiency while the new on campus Energy Centre is calculated to save over 1000 tonnes of CO2 per year compared to a conventional system.

“Many people have been following this project since it first came onto the collective sector radar some years ago,” said Jane White of AUDE. “We’re delighted to see it come to fruition so brilliantly. The numbers here are radical – particularly around space saved, and inevitably, running costs reduced. There needs to be real clarity of purpose to achieve that, and here that has been around a focus on teaching ahead of more traditionally ‘governance’ structures, and a determination to break down silos. It has been a huge collaborative task that Northampton can be proud of, as can the contractors, architects and project managers involved. Waterside is genuinely a great thing for the town.”

Pictured: Left to right: Simon Badcock, Liz Quinn, Dani Halton, Becky Bradshaw, Nigel Closs, Sarah Steers, Tom Hunt and John Howes.