The Welcome Building

THE WELCOME BUILDING

SEPTEMBER 2017

The Welcome Building in Bishop Auckland consists of a new viewing tower and central ticketing hall for the The Auckland Project. It acts as an access point and gateway to the wider site whilst also giving views over the town and landscape setting. The tower – a timber framed structure – is now well under way on site.

The building team has worked tirelessly and with the highest level of precision, to build the in-situ concrete lift shaft. Working from the ground up seemed to take an age.

Meanwhile, the enormous larch glulam beams have been carefully crafted and manually grey-oiled in the joiner’s workshop.

The frames are now being lifted into position on site and suddenly the building can be seen. Almost in an instant. As if the past four years had happened in the blink of an eye.

We are so excited and proud – even – to see this fantasy project becoming real at last. But with completion on the horizon, time seems to now move all too fast.

UK’S BEST MODERN CHURCH AWARD

NOVEMBER 2013

The Bishop Edward King Chapel was among the winners of the ‘The UK’s Best Modern Churches’ competition which celebrates the best churches built within the last 50 years, announced at a ceremony held at Lambeth Palace in London. The open competition was run by the National Churches Trust, in association with the Ecclesiastical Architects and Surveyors Association and the 20th Century Society.

Of the top ten selected winners, the Chapel for Ripon College was the most recent nomination, with eight of the ten built in the late 50s and early 60s. The scheme was described as “a treat to look at” and “architecturally elegant, with a lovely intimate reflective interior.”

Link to Best Modern Churches