Bringing Hillsborough Park to Life

Bringing Hillsborough Park to Life is a collaboration between architecture students and Age UK Sheffield. Age UK Sheffield is currently renovating Hillsborough Park’s Grade II Listed former Coach House into a dementia-friendly older people’s centre and cafe, following a successful National Lottery Heritage Fund bid. The brick Potting Shed, once used by the walled garden when it provided food for the main house, will be redeveloped to become a creative ‘Makers Shed’, providing dementia-friendly activities from crafting and woodwork to gardening and sewing. The park’s Bowling Pavilion will be operated by the charity for leisure uses and community hire. The Live Project team was tasked with supporting the redevelopment of this campus through a reimagining of the current park to better connect the buildings with the parkland and engage further stakeholders in creative proposals for the enhancement of these spaces.

The project scope was split into two principal workflows, identified early on. These consisted of a short term deliverable i.e improved, exciting wayfinding for the park, and following this, a future vision for the master plan of the park. The Live Project undertook several pop-up events that tested different strategies outlined by conversations with the client that formed the brief. Several of these pop-up events were aimed at forming collaboartions with community partners, both exisitng and potential, whilst testing possible infrastructure for events to take place in the future.

The culmination of the six weeks saw the Live Project successfully integrate itself not only with the community partners but foster excitement within these new relationships and formalise a new vision for the park and its family. The new designs, both short-term and long-term offer a view to the ambitions of an inter-generational landscape that can provide moments for play, meeting, exercise, education, and performance all whilst remaining sensitive to the needs of Age UK.

We have enjoyed working with Steve and all of the stakeholders to create this exciting vision and thank everyone who has happily taken part with us in bringing Hillsborough Park to life!

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Credits

Student Team: 

Alex Furness, Andžela Petreikytė, Ash Mathur, Blair Luther-Veitch, Blake (Huiyu) Zhou, Boyang Xu, Elle Thompson, Felicia (Shangxuan) Wu, Izzy Mullen, Jake Watkins, Laiyu Cui, Qian Zhao, Xiaolu Qin, Xin Li

Mentor:

Simon Baker