Community centre development

The historic Martinborough Town Hall was given the green light for earthquake strengthening in 2010. The community came up with plans for an exciting and modern extension to the heritage building, which included reconfiguring the surrounding playground. The idea was to transform the hall into an outstanding multipurpose space for the whole district. The extension would house the Martinborough Library, a busy I-Site, a café, toy library, meeting space, and Plunket rooms. We came on board to help the development committee with the resource consent application. 
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We coordinated discussions between architects, archaeologists, builders and other planners, and met with residential and commercial neighbours surrounding the Hall. This project was close to our hearts because our Martinborough office is only two blocks away.

Urban planning puzzles
The Hall is a celebrated heritage building located on a complicated piece of land held in several titles. The area is in both a historic heritage precinct and a commercial zone, and opposite a residential zone. The land is also within a council reserve with some titles holding recreation reserve status, some historic reserve and others community purpose reserve status. Those complex layers meant that we needed to carefully consider a range of overlapping planning issues: Heritage values, heritage guidelines, commercial and residential amenity, the Reserve Management Plan, the Hall’s Conservation and Management Plan and the possibility of alterations to infrastructure.
 
Once we saw how all the overlapping issues fit together, we could recommend changes and approaches to the architects to make the consenting process easier for them.

Consents were approved and the centre has been built. It's design enhances and rejuvenates the historic Hall, retaining its historic heritage character and making it the social centre of town once again.