Baldry Gardens
Streatham Common Health Centre is situated just south of Streatham Common in the London Borough of Lambeth. It replaces an existing centre built in the 1960s on the same site. The building is 3-storey and L-shaped in plan. The building features services which include ground floor flexible use suite with group room and staff and office accommodation; first floor reception & waiting, GP/ nurse consulting rooms; second floor plant room.
The Centre occupies the whole of a relatively prominent site on the corner of Streatham High Road and a local residential street, Baldry Gardens, and incorporates a west-facing garden with access from a ground floor group room.
The building plays on its simple massing - the conjunction of two wings, one running east/ west and the other north/south and the quality of the brickwork and the size and nature of the windows. The third storey brickwork plant room rises above, and marks, the entrance where the two wings converge.
Designed to be as sustainable as possible, spaces are daylit and where possible naturally ventilated. The building also employs a biomass boiler.
White brickwork elevations forge a connection between the multifarious brickwork colours used in the eclectic street of period and modern houses and the white render recently used to overclad the housing estate immediately south of the Centre. Windows are thermally broken bronze-anodised aluminium.
Streatham Common Health Centre has been designed to create a calm and therapeutic healthcare environment, an exemplary working environment for staff, and for ease of adaptability. The Centre has in addition been planned for secure out-of-hours community use.
The £3.01 million building is being procured for the NHS/ Lambeth Southwark and Lewisham LIFT Company by Building Better Health, and will be completed in 2010. The project team includes architects Buschow Henley, structural engineer Price and Myers, environmental engineer Cundall, landscape architect Landscape Projects, cost consultant Davis Langdon and contractor Willmott Dixon.
