Former Richard Dunn Sports Centre, Wibsey, Bradford

Summary

A local sports and leisure centre, built 1974-1978, by Trevor Skempton of the Bradford City Architects department with consulting engineers White, Young and partners.

Only the external and supporting structure and access bridge from the entrance to the reception are included in the listing. The internal changing, sporting, viewing, refreshment and administration facilities, and the boiler chimney are excluded from the listing.

Description

A local sports and leisure centre built from 1974 to 1978 and designed by project architect Trevor Skempton of the Bradford City Architect’s department. White, Young and partners were consulting engineers. The general contractors were Sir Alfred McAlpine.

MATERIALS: concrete edge beams, a steel cable-stayed roof covered with aluminium, aluminium glazing, a glazed steel access bridge, and concrete-block walls.

PLAN: an oval ‘big top’, 100m long and 60m wide, and 40m high.

EXTERIOR: a giant, tent-like structure which also resembles a tortoise’s shell; the gently-curved roof is supported by elliptical concrete arches along each side, which cross at the corners in a striking, sculptural manner with curved angles and faceted junctions. The roof itself, of profiled aluminium sheeting, is punctuated by a 1200mm diameter mast at either end of the ridge, rising 7m and supporting cables which punch through the covering to support the unseen lattice-girder structure beneath. The soffit of the beams is punctuated by the unused sockets for the originally-intended roof-structure cables. The ‘hipped’ ends are five-faceted.

The entrance faces north-east and comprises glazed aluminium doors (concealed by an external roller shutter) in an otherwise largely blind wall, which due to the ground levels is relatively low and largely concealed by a ramped path sloping down at the north. The concrete beams are supported by piloti at regular intervals.

The vertical end walls are largely glazed, with upper lights that angle away from the interior to meet the beams. At the north-west corner a solid-walled outshut, largely blind and with end buttresses and a profiled roof, expresses the squash court provision.

The south-west side is taller. At the left is the blind wall of the sports area. In the centre and right the projecting, blind first-floor wall of the facilities block is supported on concrete beams and piloti, creating an undercroft in which there is a loading entrance. The second-floor glazing angles out from the interior, more sharply above the transom, to meet the beam. Galvanised fire escapes descend at either side of this block.

INTERIOR: the entrance accesses a lattice-girder bridge with glazed sides, that ramps up to the reception in a multi-storey block along the south-west side of the interior. The bridge has good views of the vast interior space and the striking roof structure, which with its masts and cable stays in particular is even more reminiscent of a tent than the exterior.

The multi-storey block contains spaces for reception*, refreshment*, offices* and changing*. However, the external wall of the multi-storey block, forming part of the envelope of the building, is included in the listing. Sporting and viewing facilities* are located in single-storey blocks to the north and the pool hall to the south. Again, the external wall of the squash court block is included in the listing.

* Pursuant to s1 (5A) of the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990 (‘the Act’) it is declared that the reception, refreshment, office and changing areas and the sporting and viewing facilities are not of special architectural or historic interest. However any works which have the potential to affect the character of the listed building as a building of special architectural or historic interest may still require listed building consent and this is a matter for the local planning authority to determine.

History

The Richard Dunn Sports Centre was one of a group of early municipal leisure centres with fun pools in England. Multi-use indoor sports centres began to be built following the publication in 1960 of the Wolfenden and Abermarle Reports (on sports provision and youth services, respectively). These marked a shift away from training for excellence and competition towards amenities appealing to all the family. However, although some included dedicated facilities for dry-slope skiing (Harlow, Essex opened 1964), roller skating (Stockton, Durham 1966), community events (Bracknell, Berkshire 1967), ice-skating and theatre (Billingham, Durham 1967), they were still largely focussed on provision for sports rather than fun and leisure. Pools (which were more commonly built separately) were for swimming and diving only. A few centres - notably Newcastle’s Lightfoot (1965) and Billingham – made use of innovative structural technology to create striking architectural forms.

During the early 1970s, the building of leisure centres accelerated, driven by factors including local government reorganisation, increasingly affordable package holidays and the increasing recognition of leisure as an economic and cultural sector, of which sport was a part. A small minority however included fun pools as their main attraction, and were in essence a new, indoor, generation of lidos. The first (in 1974) were Bletchley (Buckinghamshire, designed by Faulkner-Brown, Hendy, Watkinson, Stonor – Faulkner-Browns), Whitley Bay (Tyne and Wear, Gillinson, Barnett and Partners - GBP) and Herringthorpe in Rotherham (South Yorkshire, also by GBP). By the end of 1978 18 of these leisure centres with fun pools had been built, including the Richard Dunn centre.

The design of these pools replicated the fun and informality of a family holiday in the sun. They were places which could be enjoyed by all generations, with a temperature-controlled environment and free-form pools with gentle shelving to allow children to play as if at the beach. New technology made possible water purification without chlorine, and wave machines. Most included spaces for diving, slides for splashing and adjacent seating areas with sun loungers (some with sun lamps), and some had tropical planting thriving in the warmth, and artificial beach-scapes.

Some were stark, plain boxes like Whitley Bay (although the original concept here was of a huge stepped-pyramid solarium above a surfing pool with beach), Concordia (Cramlington, Northumberland, by Faulkner-Browns and opened 1977), Northgate Arena (Chester, by Building Design Partnership – BDP – and opened 1977) and Crowtree (Sunderland, by GBP, leisure pool opened 1978). However, inspired by examples elsewhere (including Japan’s Summerland and the USA’s Houston Astrodome), some also had bold architectural structures over the pool. These included pyramids at Bletchley and Rotherham, and a dome at GBP’s Oasis in Swindon (built 1974 to 1975 and now the earliest surviving of these structures and listed at Grade II – National Heritage List for England (NHLE) entry 1476563). This type of facility would revolutionise leisure in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly when the commercial sector also began to build them, but in the 1970s they were an exclusively municipal building type.

The genesis of the Richard Dunn centre came in 1970, when Bradford’s City Architect (Owen Perry) recruited three final-year architecture students and assigned each a major feasibility study. Trevor Skempton was tasked with a major sports centre for Odsal. Like that of the stadium across the road, the site was a former quarry which had been used for landfill: the scheme eventually involved filling some of the remaining valley and using piles to support the building. Skempton envisaged a community landmark for the dramatic site, as Odsal Big Top, a permanent roof with adaptable spaces beneath it.

Influenced by Kenzo Tange’s Japanese national gymnasium, and Frei Otto’s tensile structures, the original concept was for a cable-supported tent roof. Visits were made with the consulting engineers to similar structures, including North-Yorkshire reservoir covers. The team also visited Billingham Forum (which has a rigid-cable roof structure to its ice rink) and other sports centres in the cluster of early examples in the north-east. After the disastrous 1973 fire at the Isle of Man’s Summerland (the earliest leisure pool in the British Isles, opened in 1971), double-skinned aluminium was chosen over a timber roof covering.

During construction (beginning in 1974 with levelling the site), the engineers retained by the building control department insisted on more robust and expensive cable connections than those chosen by the design engineers. The architects adapted the design to a cable-stayed, tubular-steel, lattice-girder system. This made the recesses built into the concrete edge girder redundant. However, the revised roof design remains true to the original design concept, with the final tent-like shape, realised on a relatively modest budget and creating a single great flexible interior space, adding a spatial experience that the usual rectangular sports centres did not have. The total cost was around £1.5m.

The entire roof structure was analysed as a space frame by computer using the Genesys Frame Analysis 2 computer programme, using data collected from a wind tunnel test carried out on the architect’s one-hundredth scale model of the building. This resulted in the flatter profile of the completed roof, with the resulting greater projection of the upper masts now supporting a series of external tie bars (cable stays). The journal Building Design noted in 1978 that ‘computer aided design structures such as this are few and far between.’

The centre was named after a local professional boxer (who continued to work as a scaffolder and serve as a territorial army paratrooper) who won the British and Commonwealth heavyweight boxing titles in 1975 and the European title in 1976. This earned him a WBA and WBC world title match against Muhammad Ali in May 1976, which he lost after a technical knockout. Dunn also fought Joe Bugner in 1976 but was knocked out in the first round, surrendering his titles to Bugner.

When it opened, the centre had a leisure pool, large multi-sports hall with terraced and expandable seating, climbing wall, an upper hall, small sports hall, four squash courts and a shooting range, as well as a cafeteria and a bar/events room, offices and storage. A curtain dividing the roofspace above the entrance bridge was also an original feature, although the dry side is reported always to have smelt of the pool. The centre proved very popular, with large crowds for international events, and regular long queues to use the facilities, in particular the pool. The shooting gallery however was reportedly little-used.

The interior (in 2022) has seen relatively minor alterations; a children’s splash pool was created in the corner of the leisure pool, and flumes were added in place of the original slides. As would be expected, the interiors of the public areas and the tiled finish of the pool have been refurbished. The exterior landscape has also been partly altered by the addition of a BMX track to the west of the centre.

The centre was also used for election counts. It closed in November 2019, and housed a temporary mortuary during the Covid 19 pandemic. It is now disused.

Reasons for Listing

The former Richard Dunn Sports Centre, a local leisure centre of 1974 to 1978 with some alterations, is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:

Architectural interest:
* dating from 1974-1978, the 40m-high ‘big-top’ roof rising from its elliptical edge beams and slung from the tall masts is a sophisticated and architecturally striking structure which provided a dramatic setting for the sports provision within;

* the cable-stayed lattice-girder roof (an early instance of computer-aided design) and elliptical concrete edge beams exhibit clear engineering virtuosity and were well-suited to the function, having withstood the humidity of the pool environment;

* the principal features (internally, most notably the roof structure and the glazed bridge accessing reception) survive well with the general form and architectural intention remaining clear.

External Links

Historic England Listing

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