A council-led development in rural Derbyshire

This article about quiet civicness in rural Derbyshire made the heart of our first issue of Public Notice magazine. Written by Krish Nathaniel, it deep dives into the challenge, process and impact of the Ada Belfield Centre and Belper Library development, led by Derbyshire County Council.

Regardless of the challenge of spending reductions faced by all local authorities, exemplar community projects which point a route to an alternate and emboldened civicness remain beacons of hope, particularly for rural and coastal communities, and Belper’s twin facilities show both a pride in localism and respect for local people. Read below for a snippet of the content.

In the Peak District, eight miles north of Derby lies the small town of Belper, set within the shallow valley of the River Derwent.

Walking Belper’s streets, between grey-tan Derbyshire stone and red brick homes, the grain of this market town feels well-preserved.

A former centre for textiles and cotton, like many other towns along the Derwent Valley, Belper’s walkable streets are today host to a significant and eclectic range of independent shops, pubs, cafes and businesses. Sloping westward toward the Derwent, King Street is at the heart of this town of 20,000 people. Superdrug, Specsavers and a number of other nationwide chains punctuate the high street, but their presence hasn’t dampened the vibrancy of the town’s small businesses and shops. The town’s cinema, The Ritz, can be found at the top of the hill, while record and vintage shop Think Twice attracts a younger crowd.

Belper was built on its proximity to the Derwent, which passes just west of the town centre, snaking south to eventually join the River Trent. But today’s thoroughfares are the rail and road links which pass through the town. Behind King Street is the rail station, linking Belper to Derby and Nottingham and occasional direct services to London. To its south lies the bus station and the main road running south to Derby. Surprisingly, given such well-connected routes, almost three-quarters of Belper’s residents travel to work by car.

Beyond the town is a rural area of rolling pastureland, dotted with villages and larger market towns like Alfreton, Ambergate, Ripley and Heanor. Together with Belper, this area forms Amber Valley, the local district authority, which sits within the wider county of Derbyshire, forming a two-tier authority with Derbyshire County Council. With just 126,000 residents, Amber Valley has a population slightly smaller than Norwich, but spread across an area six times its size, making up about a sixth of the county’s total population.

Rising above an unassuming patchwork of pitched and tiled roofs, this small market town is home to the dramatic seven-storey forms of two red brick mills. The Belper North and East Mills, ever-present symbols of the Derwent Valley’s role in shaping Derbyshire’s industrial rise during the late 18th and 19th centuries, watch over a town and landscape which has otherwise faced steady industrial decline. And as with so many other parts of the country, Belper and Amber Valley have tilted toward the service economy. Among the remnants of this Victorian legacy, cottage industries and independent businesses continue.

Industrial heritage remains an enduring and pride-filled part of the area’s identity.

Belper is particularly well-preserved, with over half of Amber Valley’s listed buildings in Belper alone and more than 600 heritage listings in the town. A place of international significance, both North and East Mills form part of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site (DVMWHS), awarded to the region by UNESCO, the UN’s culture agency in 2001, and putting the area on a par with the Acropolis and Stonehenge.

Today, the closeness of the street pattern and scale of buildings favour smaller, independent businesses, with a significant number of micro-pubs operating in the town. While small pockets of manufacturing remain (the cleaning gel Swarfega was invented here), the town’s main employers are dominated by the retail and service sectors.

At Hunky Dory, a crystal and natural products shop just south of King Street, owner Bob McGarrity talks about the town’s character.

In business for over 14 years, the shop is a maze of crystals on counters and natural cosmetics stacked on shelves. McGarrity walks to the back of the shop to a surprisingly clinical laboratory tucked behind the counter where he mixes essential oils, bar soaps and shampoo, “I make all the products that are on the wooden shelves there”.

In terms of home ownership, Belper does considerably better than the national average, with around 80% of residents owning their own home, higher than the 62% average for England. But fuel poverty in the town is high, with 15% of households in central Belper being fuel-poor.

The horizon of sloping green farmland surrounding the town provides a deceptively rural feel.

By its appearance, Belper could seem to follow the fate of many of Britain’s coastal and market towns: declining foot traffic and a dying high street. McGarrity is at pains to show that the opposite is true here. “Tail-end of last year, we lost three shops off this row, but they’ve all been filled.”

Just behind Hunky Dory, on a factory site formerly owned by the Thorntons chocolate company is the Ada Belfield Centre and Belper Library. A co-located development, the scheme consists of a large residential care home, managed in-house by Derbyshire County Council, and a public library. Approaching the complex, the red brick of the retained factory facade, now the Belper Library, comes into view, set beside the local Derbyshire stone which clads the contemporary care home to its south.

A development of two parts, the Ada Belfield Centre replaces the Ada Belfield Home, a 1960s care home in the north of the town. At the same time, the new library supplants former space, which was housed across three floors of a converted detached house, formerly a doctor’s surgery.

This new development, funded and project-managed by Derbyshire County Council (DCC), brought not just the local planning authority, Amber Valley Borough Council (AVBC) to the table, but stakeholders from the County Council’s strategic care service, library service as well as third sector heritage and conservation organisations tasked with preserving the area’s world heritage character.

Set across a 0.6 hectare site, the redevelopment, which retains part of the old Thorntons factory, has also activated the space to its east, forming a paved public square between the town centre and care home.

The care home itself, built as a horseshoe plan around a residents-only courtyard, has been designed for dementia care and carefully linked to the library through its entrance foyer and cafe.

Derbyshire County Council’s ambition for the development was to create an integrated scheme with complementary services and accommodation to create a successful and sustainable community development. The former care home in Belper, the Ada Belfield Home, had been identified as a striking but ultimately flawed facility. A two-storey flat-roofed building in use since its construction in 1965, its fabric had heavily deteriorated. Retention and retrofit might have been considered a preferred option, but the driver for a replacement came with the potential to restore a much-loved but derelict building, in the form of the former Thorntons factory.

Despite not being locally or nationally listed, the former factory was well-loved by local residents, with many of them previously employed there, and was a space of deep memory for the town.

Originally the Castle Blouse Factory, manufacturing blouses and hosiery, during the Second World War Derby-based Rolls Royce used the site to store their iconic Merlin aero engines, used to power the RAF’s Spitfire and Hurricane fighters.

In 1947, chocolate maker J. W. Thornton moved to Belper from Sheffield, providing employment for an area already witnessing the decline of its former textile industries. A factory until 2004, when the company moved to new premises in nearby Alfreton, the building had been left vacant, and was badly damaged in a fire in 2013.

The ambition to create new high-quality care facilities in Derbyshire came from a strategic plan for care put forward by the County Council to deliver new and upgraded care facilities. This was formalised in DCC’s Adult Care Accommodation & Support Strategy for 2015 –2020, which set a vision statement that “older people in Derbyshire are supported to live well and maintain their independence in their local community by having access to high-quality care and support services appropriate to their levels of need”.

With the DCC care centre in Belper, the Ada Belfield Home, already earmarked as nearing the end of its use, the question turned to finding a suitable site for its replacement. In parallel was a need for a new library in the town; the selection of the former Thorntons’ site and its unique size, unlocked the co-location of these two uses, care and library, side-by-side.

The planning history of the Thorntons’ site had been checkered. Tesco shelved plans to build a supermarket here in 2013, and the site remained largely silent, despite an approved outline planning permission by architecture firm Lathams in 2015 for a mixed-use development that included extra care facilities.

With an outline brief to co-locate both uses and while in discussion to purchase the site from its previous owners, Derbyshire’s Design Services Project Manager began a public procurement process for the design of the care home and library through the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) route. This route led to six architecture firms progressing to a design competition, held in February 2015 and won by London and Birmingham-based practice Glancy Nicholls Architects (GNA), with the project led by their Birmingham team.

At the time of the Belper project’s inception, the practice had already completed seven public sector care projects within the county. This included a centre in Matlock which won the RIBA MacEwan Award in 2018 and a dementia and community centre in Heanor.

Speaking about their work with council officers, practice director and project architect for the Ada Belfield Centre, Paul Hutt, outlines the role that embedded knowledge played for the client. “We were fortunate in that we’d worked on several previous County Council schemes…[one officer] was a care worker and had worked at care homes all her life, then she went into the managerial side and ultimately worked for the council in a sort of advisory role. With her past experience and knowledge, it was invaluable on certain things.”

GNA’s involvement in the care sector, and dementia care specifically, is longstanding. Since 2005, the firm has been working with the University of Stirling’s Dementia Services Development Centre (DSDC) on dementia-friendly design. Part of this research has been the development of a design accreditation scheme, which the university now operates internationally.

Working with Derbyshire County Council, project architects Paul Hutt and Emma Glover worked to create a centre which foregrounded the domestic, focusing on the often-forgotten ‘home’ element of care homes, in contrast to the more typical institutional or medical feel of these spaces.

Communal corridors had between eight to ten bedrooms, to create “small, homely environments” and use of natural light was a key factor for communal corridors, as was the use of colour to create distinct areas and features within residents’ bedrooms.

The firm also worked closely with the DCC care manager who now oversees the Centre, to prioritise the needs and comfort of care staff. Both client and architect recognised that generous space for staff is not only a win in terms of wellbeing and job satisfaction, but reduces staff turnover and burnout, which can lead to disruption not just to the care service, but to residents - many of whom benefit from familiar faces and dedicated carers. With 1.7m people in Britain predicted to be living with dementia by 2040, well-supported staff within these settings is of equally acute importance.

Given the site’s unique and globally significant UNESCO heritage context, and lying within Amber Valley’s Belper and Milford Conservation Area, heritage engagement was essential throughout the planning process. Project architects for the proposal, Paul Hutt and Emma Glover, recall detailed meetings with the Planning Case Officer and Amber Valley’s conservation officer.

Two pre-application meetings were held with the local planning authority (LPA) in late 2016, firstly with Amber Valley’s Principal Planning Officer and Assistant Director of Planning in September, and a follow-up in November with an officer from the county’s highways team. Following these meetings, the design team at GNA brought the proposal to the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site Planning and Conservation Design Panel, a non-statutory stakeholder, yet one whose input could benefit the design and sensitivity of the scheme. On advice from the planning case officer, a public exhibition for the proposal was also arranged by GNA in December of the same year, held at Belper’s Methodist Church.

The LPA’s position regarding heritage favoured the retention of the former Thorntons factory which, while not heritage-listed nationally or locally, was a highly emotive part of Belper’s history. Amber Valley were flexible enough to note that the retention of interior spaces, while better preserving the building’s built fabric, would be impractical given the need to fit resident bedrooms and an open plan library floorspace within. However, statutory consultee Historic England raised concerns regarding the perceived façadism of the scheme, with a compromise reached involving the retention of the most visible parts of the period facade and the removal of later unsympathetic additions to the original factory.

But speaking about the development at the time, AVBC’s Conservation Consultant commented that the proposal’s form, scale and massing were “in character” with its context and that the conservation area would be “preserved” by the development.

They were also appreciative of the decision to retain the building’s gabled dormer windows and cast iron columns, the latter of which were reused in the new triple height space to support lighting.

Despite not owning the site at the time of applying for planning permission, Derbyshire County Council, the official applicant, worked with Amber Valley to progress three planning applications for the scheme: an application covering the demolition of existing buildings, a full application for the care home and library and an outline application for a future D1 / D2 use on vacant land to the east of the site. The final design featured a 3,500 m2 care home, a 350 m2 public library and a 90 m2 cafe space.

To secure the development’s architectural quality from planning to completion, AVBC were proactive in building in a range of planning conditions. With forty in total, ranging from pre-commencement conditions for parking and pedestrian crossing upgrades to a public realm lighting strategy, a number of conditions focused on the retention and conversion quality of the factory building itself.

This ranged from requiring details of brick and stone repair strategies and mortar mixes, to details and samples of repaired or replaced windows, decorative gables, and cast iron rainwater downpipes and hoppers. The value placed on heritage by the LPA can be clearly seen through these conditions.

Despite falling within the threshold for a decision to be made by LPA officers alone, the tripartite application was brought before Amber Valley Borough Council’s Planning Board on April 10th 2017 at the request of a local councillor Dan Booth. Resolutely supported by members of the board, Booth gave credit to LPA officers for the planning conditions attached to the scheme to secure its quality.

Speaking at the planning board, local resident Carol Angharad, who regularly used the old library, retold a conversation she’d had with a lady in her late seventies, who, having started as a junior librarian in Belper, was told to expect a new library ‘very soon’.

In June 2017, shortly after planning permission was granted, the DCC project board published a construction tender for a design and build framework partner. A £19m contract, the intended programme was made up of two phases: Phase 1 being construction of the care home and library, and Phase 2, a D1/D2 healthcare facility. Ultimately, just the first Phase would progress, with the construction of the integrated care centre contract initially valued at £11.4m and the public library at £1.6m.

Wording and stipulations within the tender brief were an essential feature in locking in the quality DCC and GNA had developed through planning. The public invitation to tender included a number of elements designed to secure best practice in the build. Some elements were obligatory, such as the registration and inspection requirements of the National Minimum Standards for Residential and Nursing Care Homes, while others, such as the requirement for the University of Stirling’s Dementia Accreditation Gold Standard were pushed for inclusion by GNA, who have a longstanding research relationship with the University of Stirling, where they have developed an accreditation scheme for dementia-friendly design. With a target BREEAM rating of ‘Very Good’, the scheme was perhaps under-ambitious in relation to the climate crisis. The tender also made use of a novation clause, extending this to an inclusion of “the provision of an interior design service”, to ensure that both the internal spaces of the care facility and library were designed to the same standards as the exterior.

Ultimately, it was local construction firm Robertson Group who won the contract to construct the new scheme. Tasked with demolition, retention and remedial work to factory elements and construction of the new care and library facilities. Working with GNA to realise DCC’s vision of using “quality local materials wherever possible”

The facing material sourced for the Ada Belfield Centre was a local Derbyshire stone quarried from Stanton Moor, just 17 miles north of the town.

The use of a zinc shingle roof and retained brickwork elements to the library foregrounded a durable palette.

The detailed design phase was also the time that DCC library officers were brought in to shape the interior layout and use of the library space itself. Officers from Derbyshire’s Libraries and Heritage service outline a constant process of workshops and meetings with the architect to discuss furniture and the library staff’s requirements for storage, circulation and organisation. Robertson Group and GNA also brought library staff on site to provide live updates on the scheme’s progress.

The Ada Belfield Centre opened in early 2020, but perhaps unsurprisingly, not for its intended use. For six months, the centre was pressed into service as the Florence Nightingale Home, a coronavirus-only recovery centre, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. In many ways a perfect space for this role, benefitting from wide hallways and individual bedrooms designed for residents with dementia, but in this role allowing patients and staff to socially distance. A few months later, in August 2020, the new Belper Library opened with social distancing measures still in place.

Sitting under Belper Library’s vaulted roof, library staff are visibly proud of this space, and are happy to point out the library’s new-found success as Derbyshire’s second busiest library. Part of the success of the space has been its adaptability. There is a recognition from the library’s workforce that a modern library has to extend its reach beyond reading to work as a community space which can cater for diverse activities and interests.

One of the early events at the library was a visit to the town by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage in March 2021, to coincide with the building’s official opening, something which local people still speak about with pride today. A more recent use in 2023, was as an exhibition space for a unique Lego model of the Lake District. Created by local resident Jon Tordoff from the nearby village of Milford, the ten square metres model, made up of 200,000 polychrome bricks show the rivers and valleys of Buttermere. Proving to be one of the library’s biggest attractions (and unintentional advertisements), nearly three thousand people visited the artwork in the two days it was on display.

Upon opening, the Ada Belfield Home and old library were both sold at auction, the former with a guide price of £425,000. Plans have now been submitted for eight new homes to occupy the site of the former care home.

As well as engaging with the wider town, the library is intimately linked to the Ada Belfield Centre and its residents. Dementia-friendly design, which was a key driver in the design of the care home, is also a feature of the library. A handful of the centre’s residents visit to choose books, with the library hosting intergenerational craft events to bring younger and older generations together and an interactive games table drawing in school pupils with additional needs as well as residents with dementia.

With so many uses, flexibility and moveable furniture is key and the caster wheels below each bookshelf are far from idle.

Belper’s new spaces sit at odds with a national context of reduced public provision and public services. Spending on libraries specifically, has fallen by almost half (47.9%) since 2010 and this decline continued during the COVID-19 pandemic. With 764 libraries lost across the UK over the past thirteen years, this new vision of local civicness provides one example which resists this trend.

Yet the broader picture of whether a renewed civicness can turn the tide on austerity remains unclear.

In September 2023, new plans for an NHS health centre in Belper were approved, yet in the same year, Derbyshire County Council was asked to make £14m in budget savings, with the implication of giving to local communities with one hand, and taking with another.

But regardless of the challenge of spending reductions faced by all local authorities, exemplar community projects which point a route to an alternate and emboldened civicness remain beacons of hope, particularly for rural and coastal communities. Belper’s twin facilities show both a pride in localism and respect for local people. Viewed within our national placeshaping context of metro mayors, combined authorities and English devolution, such schemes add to a quiet but growing resurgence of regionalism, presenting an alternative future for communities across the country.