Beard to build new dining room at Oxfordshire private school

Beard Construction, a family-run company based in Swindon with offices in Oxford, Bristol and Guildford, has been appointed to build a new Pavilion Dining Room at a private school in Oxfordshire.

The company is already carrying out a major new-build and refurbishment project at the school, which began last year and is set to be completed by autumn.

It includes the construction of two new boarding houses for Abingdon School and the refurbishment of two existing boarding houses. The new boarding houses will attach to the existing accommodation buildings and provide accommodation for 130 boarders, increasing the current capacity of boarding pupils by 20 per cent.

A mixture of two and three-stories, the new buildings will provide single and double rooms, including two new accessible bedrooms, with shared shower-rooms, toilets, and lounge rooms. The refurbished buildings will be re-configured to provide a new social room, a study room and library, music practice room, and laundry and drying room.

The materials for the build have been chosen to be sympathetic to other school structures. Walls will be faced in either red brick or reconstituted stone, similar to that on adjacent school buildings. The windows will be timber, while the roofs will be in a pre-weathered grey standing seam zinc.

The new buildings will have as small a carbon footprint as possible, with electrical power supplemented by solar panelling and underfloor heating fed by air source heat pumps. High-speed wireless connectivity will also be available throughout every building.

Additional work will see the creation of the Pavilion Dining Room, which will be situated between the school's Amey Theatre and the Garden cafe and provide additional restaurant and hospitality facilities.

A green living roof will improve the biodiversity of the space and act as a super insulator, reducing heating costs. The Pavilion's glazed external walls will allow views of the underside of the intricate timber roof.

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Part of the Abingdon project's challenge is to carry out the work in a "live" school. To separate and facilitate deliveries to the boarding houses site, Beard has provided a 5m-wide, 100m interlocking plastic temporary road and turning circle for articulated lorries, with all vehicles being met and escorted along it by two permanent gatemen.

Beard’s Oxford director Dean Averies said: “We are proud to be working again with Abingdon School.

“One of our key values is to create high-quality spaces which matter to people and these buildings will be more than new school boarding houses, they will become a home-from-home to hundreds of young people over the years to come.

“We will call upon our expertise in this sector to ensure that combining existing buildings with new builds on a working school site can be carried out with the minimum of disruption.”

Martin McKenna, director of estates at Abingdon School, said: “At Abingdon, we are passionate about ensuring that our students and staff have up-to-date, modern, flexible and ‘fit-for-purpose’ facilities that really help them succeed academically and support them pastorally in the modern world.

“Beard has helped us achieve part of this strategic vision in the past with the creation of our sports centre. We know they understand the complexities of developing within a fully operational school environment, whilst ensuring that the highest construction standards are met in ways which are sustainably sound.

“So, when it came to engaging a contractor, we were confident Beard fully understood our requirements and would meet them accordingly.”

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