Reuse, Renewal, and Collaboration

Reclaiming the Past as a Foundation for the Future

The Bonded Warehouse, part of the Friar Gate Goods Yard regeneration, stands as one of Derby’s most significant industrial landmarks. Recent completion of remedial works to the original cast-iron frame marks a crucial milestone in safeguarding this 19th-century structure for future use.

This delicate repair process required close collaboration between conservation officers, supply chain, and design team — demonstrating that retrofit is both a technical and collaborative exercise. The repaired frame now provides a platform for new floors as part of its adaptive reuse into a vibrant, mixed-use community and workplace hub.

Drawing upon live experience from Friar Gate Goods Yard and the Ada Belfield Centre, the conversation highlighted how retrofit can unite environmental ambition with social and economic resilience alongside sobering discussion around how we measure success and our current progress as a nation.

The Ada Belfield Centre and Belper Library: Integrated Community Design

Situated within the Derwent Valley Mills UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Ada Belfield Centre and Belper Library exemplifies how heritage, care, and community can co-exist in one design narrative. Commissioned by Derbyshire County Council, the development transformed a derelict brownfield site — formerly the Thorntons Chocolate Factory — into a civic asset that blends 40 dementia-friendly residential bedrooms, a public library, and a community café arranged around a sheltered courtyard.

The scheme provides three clear spatial layers — semi-public, semi-private, and private/support zones — ensuring comfort, safety, and accessibility. Designed in line with the Stirling University Gold Standard for Dementia Design, the building incorporates high levels of daylight, clear wayfinding, and domestic-scale interiors to create a calm, therapeutic environment. Part-inserting this into an existing building delivers a sense of place for residents and settles softly a new, comparatively large facility into an historic area of outstanding natural beauty.

Historic but non-designated red-brick façades from the original factory were retained and woven into the new construction of the community library, delivering significant embodied-carbon savings while anchoring the project to Belper’s industrial identity. Elements of the factory’s original steel frame were repurposed to support bold new window openings in its envelope. The integration of old and new demonstrates how reuse can be both sustainable and contextually rich.

The project has earned extensive recognition, including:

• RIBA Regional Award Winner 2022
  East Midlands
• Derbyshire Historic Building Trust Architecture Awards 2021
  Reuse of an Historic Building
• Building Better Healthcare Awards 2021
  Grand Prix Design Award
• Building Better Healthcare Awards 2021
  Best Dementia Care Development
• Planning Awards 2021
  Best use of Heritage in Placemaking
• AJ Retrofit Awards 2021
  Best Healthcare Building
• Dementia Services Development Centre
  Gold Award

Heritage as a Catalyst for Innovation

Both The Bonded Warehouse and The Ada Belfield Centre overturn the notion that heritage and innovation sit at opposite ends of the spectrum.

In Belper, co-locating a care home with a public library dissolves boundaries between generations, encouraging everyday social interaction and giving older residents continued visibility in community life. In Derby, the restoration of the Bonded Warehouse’s cast-iron frame represents technical heritage engineering at its most forward-looking — a platform for low-carbon redevelopment and civic re-engagement. The old factory acted as a bridge to a new beneficial facility for Belper without risk of gentrification or harm to what makes the place special.

These projects show that adaptive reuse can be both a technical and a social innovation, bringing together local authorities, conservation bodies, contractors, and communities around a shared purpose.

Designing for Continuity and Connection

The guiding principle behind both projects is continuity — strengthening the connection between people, place, and time.

The Ada Belfield Centre and Belper Library provide an inclusive civic focus where learning and wellbeing converge. As Hugh Pearman, former Editor of RIBA Journal, observed:

Contextual sensitivity runs through each detail — from material palette to roofline and urban grain — ensuring the architecture contributes positively to both the townscape and the wider heritage landscape.

Looking Forward: Collaboration as a Design Tool

The CIOB / RIBA Retrofit Panel reaffirmed that successful retrofit depends on designing the process of collaboration as carefully as the building itself. Cross-disciplinary partnerships, transparent data, and value-based procurement are critical to unlocking the environmental and social potential of reuse.

Projects such as Friar Gate Goods Yard demonstrate how this works in practice: design becomes a common language through which technical ambition and civic purpose can align. Each intervention — from the repair of cast-iron columns to the framing of new public spaces — is part of a broader narrative of stewardship.

Retrofit, then, is not simply a conservation exercise; it is a design philosophy rooted in empathy and foresight. It recognises that sustainability is as much about continuity of community as it is about efficiency of structure.

Retrofitting older buildings can be challenging for developers, as ageing structures often carry hidden costs, technical complications, and unforeseen conditions that add uncertainty and financial risk. These issues can make refurbishment seem less attractive than new-build alternatives. However, with knowledgeable designers who can think on their feet, anticipate complexities, and respond creatively as issues arise, many of these barriers can be effectively managed. 

At the same time, early and open dialogue with conservation officers and heritage groups helps demystify regulatory constraints and align ambitions, ensuring redevelopment opportunities are understood and supported. Together, this combination of technical agility and collaborative engagement allows communities to benefit from reinvigorated buildings while safeguarding the character and heritage of our built environment.

Conclusion

Across these two East Midlands located projects, it is illustrated how reuse and regeneration can bridge technical excellence with genuine social value. They remind us that one of architecture’s greatest contributions lie not only in creating new form, but in re-activating existing fabric — linking the heritage of yesterday with the needs of tomorrow. In a culture that promotes recycling of our waste products, this same positive attitude should be more widely considered with our country’s old building stock.

The lessons shared at the CIOB / RIBA Retrofit Panel continue to resonate: sustainable progress will depend on collaboration, contextual understanding, and long-term stewardship. Through this lens, the adaptive reuse of buildings becomes a collective act of optimism — proof that renewal can honour the past while empowering the future.

By Adam McPartland RIBA, Managing Director, Glancy Nicholls Architects