Cheshire Archives Contract Award

The MEP Projects team, at Kimpton, working with Kier Construction North & Scotland, have been awarded the £2m M&E Contract for the delivery of the new Chester History Centre to be built at the site of the former Enterprise Centre, Lightfoot Street, Chester.

The National Lottery Heritage Fund is contributing £4.45m towards the project and this will also help fund a programme of activities across the county until March 2027.

The design for the new centre, by local Architects Ellis Williams is being built to BREEAM Excellent standard which will ensure net zero from day one and very stringent standards throughout.

Working to BREEAM standards means we will be installing more sustainable energy measures such as a large Solar PV array on the roof to provide power. The additional benefit of this is lower waste emissions and lower overall running costs into the future.

The M&E contract covers all aspects of the electrics throughout and the heating and cooling via a VRF Air Conditioning system. We will also be delivering all of the above ground drainage throughout. Ventilation is critical in BREEAM buildings to ensure a turnover of air without creating draughts. In addition there is domestic plumbing and the water supply for kitchen and bathrooms for staff and customers within the centre.

Cheshire Archives and Local Studies is a shared service of Cheshire West and Chester Council and Cheshire East Council. They look after the county’s totally unique and irreplaceable written and pictorial history. The plan is to rehouse the archives in two new state-of-the-art history centres in this one in Chester and a second site in Crewe.

The archives have been preserved in Cheshire for 70 years in their current location and have both local and national importance, recording the history of the county over the last 900 years.

With rare artefacts and irreplaceable objects, control of light, heat and humidity is vital. We need to create a totally benign environment for them to be protected and preserved. The fire systems also have to be well planned to avoid potential water damage to priceless artefacts in the event of an emergency.

The new location will provide even greater opportunity to access the archives for historians, to understand more about their personal and local community history.

The site is currently being cleared ready for work on site to begin. Our work on site should start around June this year and is expected to take around seven months.