Horsham Blue Light

Horsham District Council and West Sussex Fire & Rescue Service appointed Willmott Dixon and their consultant team, including HOP to help deliver a new facility for the service and provide training for stations across Sussex.

The key features include a Fire Station, Drill Yard, 2 Garages, a combined Training Tower and a live Fire Training Facility including the associated services. The team developed the scheme through RIBA Stages 2 – 5. The high tech premises also includes a residential area for new recruit training, an incident command training facility and realistic road traffic collision training rooms with digital simulation.

The structural concept for the majority of the buildings was a steel frame supporting a roof deck and composite floors, together with an RC frame with a steel top floor which was employed on the live fire training building to deal with the services complexities and heat generated during use. The site wide drainage strategy was installed to deal with the high volumes of training water, foam and highly contaminated run off, from the live Fire Training use.

Sustainability was at the heart of the project with a strong emphasis on renewable energy sources such as solar panels and air source heat pumps as well as electric charging points to encompass the local Council’s drive to become carbon neutral by 2030.