BY ROBERT HOLDEN (published in the Architect's Journal 17 February 2000)
Denby Main closed in 1969. Cadeby was the last coal pit in Conisbrough to go; it never re-opened after the end of the 1980s miners’ strike. Now the Earth Centre is remaking 170 ha of this Yorkshire landscape of coal and limestone workings. It is an ecological education centre-come-theme park, not so much an instructional museum as a demonstration of a possible future.
The idea for the centre came from former publisher John Lens, who envisaged it as dealing with the basic elements of earth, fire, water and animal, vegetable and human life. Jonathan Smales, previously the director of Greenpeace UK, then steered it through 10 years of lottery and other bids. Financing was eventually secured with a £21 million award by the Millennium Commission, £10 million from the European Commis sion and a further £5.5 million from English Partnerships, with £1.37 million in landfill-tax credits and £4 million from the private sector - £42 million in all for phase one. The estimate is £100 million for the total development, which will include Future Systems’ Ark in phase three.
Derek Lovejoy Partnership produced a masterplan for the site, set in the valley of the canalised River Don, in January 1997 and work began that autumn with a land reclamation project by Ove Arup and Partners. Two mounds have been created and a subsidiary of the Don re-vegetated to make a park-like setting where meadows and woodlands will grow. This gives a pastoral quality to sections of the national Sustrans cycle route and the Pennine Way that cross the site.
The entrance of the Earth Centre is outside Conisbrough railway station, on the south side of the River Don. The ambition is to promote public transport, a two-hour trip from London, and admission is cheaper with a railway ticket. Once inside, there are some big tricycles but no ‘people movers’ as yet. There’s no miniature railway, as at the garden festivals or in a Disney theme park, even though the ultimate scale is similar.
The Earth Centre is a charity and the land is owned by Doncaster Council. Directors include David Copeland who was previously in charge of Gateshead Garden Festival. So far just the 20 ha first phase is open, but even this is bigger in area and more ambitious than, say, the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales, which has grown incrementally over the three decades since it opened.
The masterplan study by Derek Lovejoy Partnership, with Battle McCarthy as engineer, was a model document based on a series of concept plans and sections to describe energy flows, agriculture, waste recycling, play and sculpture. This study set the location of the theme areas and the main circulation pattern.
Feilden Clegg was appointed consultant architect and Grant Associates as landscape architect. Grant Associates’ role was to work with the engineer in co-ordinating levels, and with the architect in locating the buildings, as well as designing both hard and soft landscape. The idea was to make the land really work and to bring back the site from the dead by renewal, apart from some specific habitats -for example, on the limestone terraces.
Grant Associates, director Andrew Grant finds the terraces and grooves of old sidings and railway tracks interesting, but this was not a site like Duisburg Nord Landschaftspark where the industrial buildings and artefacts survived (AJ 9.11.95). All had been wiped away in the land reclamation. However, the setting is a powerful and enclosed landscape, and the story of prehistoric, medieval and industrial settlement is something the designers wanted to remember and mark.
But the story is also of a new future: this year, schools accommodation and conference facilities will be on site as part of the £15 million phase two, involving a building by Bill Dunster using recycled materials. Currently planned is the Bridge Research and Business Park, which should open on the south bank of the River Don in 2001. The final phase of development - for which EU funding is now being sought -will see construction of The Ark and the Earth Centre Institute for Sustainable Development in 2002.
Grant states: ‘This is not a garden festival ‘Which provokes the question: what is it? It’s the size of a garden festival and it’s on reclaimed land, but unlike a British garden festival it is intended to be permanent. The message is to do with sustainability and the environment. But it is not entirely obvious what this means. There is no clear route around the series of exhibits or demonstrations as at the Geological Museum or the Centre for Alternative Technology, for instance. Nor is there a Disney-style well-directed entry to Main Street or a hub, and on to a clover-leaf choice of theme areas. Of course, at present the Earth Centre is just a first phase, but it shows.
Arriving by car, you park in an area with French drains and swales (open shallow ditches), through which surplus water passes, via filters and interceptors, into the River Don. Then you cross the river over a refurbished industrial bridge which leads to a spiral of white limestone and black coal spoil - bold in plan but innocuous on the ground.
To the left is Solar Point, a triangular plaza of riven York stone from Marshall’s Wakefield quarry. On one side lies the solid Cadeby limestone- faced Planet Earth Gallery by Feilden Clegg, in which Russian opera designer George Tsypin, and New York- based 30/70 have designed a weird, clangy, flashing-lights exhibit. Here a chummy Yorkshireman chats to you about what it all means. At first, in the dark, this seems impressive; but as the eyes become accustomed it looks like a barely comprehensible funfair dis play in a sort of hanger. Above there is buy Body Shop stuff and pick up information on the environment.
On the other side of Solar Point is Feilden Clegg’s Eat building, clad in green oak, and offering a range of organic foods. It’s a bit corporate - rather like a Cranks for IBM operatives - but the visitors seem satisfied. It is managed by a Yorkshire restaurateur who emphasises local sources. This calls to mind the competition brief for Parc La Villette in Paris, which specified the importance of local cuisine. There the result has been fast catering and lousy coffee so it is good to see something better in Yorkshire.
Solar Point (which will be roofed with photovoltaic cells later this year) is on an axis which aligns with Conisbrough Castle to the south-east and the future Ark to the north-west - but until the latter is built there is no land mark for visitors to aim towards.
Phase one itself forms a large triangle in plan with the straight canalised portion of the River Don as one of the three sides. The straight lines of the entrance plaza form another. The third side of the triangle consists of wide curves which repeat as a series of terraced gardens. Beyond phase one to the north and east are flowing parkland and newly planted woods on other reclamation areas.
Running diagonally across phase one is an axial route from the river to Alsop and Störmer’s tropically planted Water Works building, which continues to a large water tank and then to the Whaleback, a heap of reshaped colliery spoil. An existing brook, the Cadeby stream, has been retained and runs through a tree-lined valley.
Also within phase one are a series of theme gardens designed by Andrew Grant: wetlands along the river, a play area, reed and willow coppices, and an orchard. The whole is an interdepen dent system: drainage water from the paths and roofs goes via swales into the wetland pools, sewage goes via treatment terraces to the Water Works. Solar cells and future wind mills will provide power.
In part this is a play park, in part a series of wildlife areas, and in part a garden festival-like collection of objects. Less kitsch than an English garden festival, and with less horticultural interest than a Chelsea Flower Show or Harlow Carr Garden in Harrogate, this is a tasteful but oblique exercise in environmentalism in a new and rolling, pastoral landscape. Enclosure will come when the wood lands grow, horticultural interest will come when the plants grow, and shade when the trees mature. At present it is too soon to say whether it will really excite.
Of course, the Earth Centre is not intended to be about instant and impressive effects: it is young and should develop over time. At present it lacks the focus of the Ark building and the public cannot enjoy the wider views which will come in phases two and three. You can only experience the parkland from the Sustrans route, while phase one on its own is cluttered and busy as a design without being filled with people.
It is a place full of interest for landscape-architecture students (from willow-woven hedges to the use of every sort of gravel mulch), which must seem obscure for the casual visitor. Less engaging than Gilles Clément’s recent Jardin Planétaire at La Vilette (AJ 13.1.00), it lacks interactivity, either low- or high-tech.
The landscape is very consistently designed by the one hand, but is compartmentalised and varied. While it is not yet as interesting as, say, the 1992 Zoetermeer Floriade (garden festival), which was a comparable formal scheme using triangles and axes, it is much more serious and considered than the English garden festivals of the 1980s. It is rather mysterious and sometimes impenetrable: an ace caff with an operatic exhibition, a children’s playground, and a wildlife area with a funky sewage-treatment display.
All this may just be the beginning: a prelude to the grand set-piece which is Future Systems’ Ark, set in a sublime and futuristic parkland - but at present it is something of a let down. For this place to really work it needs to fill with people; so far it is a promising but rather empty setting. One idea for the future is to offer free entrance to the park and then charge for the attractions. Whether that happens or not, let’s hope that the Earth Centre attracts sufficient visitors. The jury must remain out for the time being.
