RSPB St Aidan’s Nature Reserve

Project Information

Overview

The RSPB is embarking on an extensive programme of improvements to their nature reserves in the Aire Valley, southeast of Leeds. 

This is a landscape that has seen considerable change and although in green belt, which gives planning challenges, it still bears the scars of nearly two hundred years of industrialisation.

Working with Experience Community and the RSPB, we are examined how improvements to accessibility, may be brought forward to greatly increase the range of visitors and improve the visitor experience.

DSA worked form the RSPB and alongside Lathams Architects on this exciting proposal for a new visitor centre on the extensive St Aidan’s Nature Reserve. The scheme formed a bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund. The site is part of a much wider RSPB reserve, lying along the valley of the River Aire, close to Allerton Bywater (the settlement of Woodend) and within the Leeds City Council’s administrative area. The project is especially aimed at people who wouldn’t typically go bird watching! It’s designed to reach further and attract users who would travel not only by car, the ‘traditional’ method, but on foot, by bus, cycle and even horse.

Aside from being a highly designated and cherished refuge for wildlife, the site lies in Green Belt and is in the flood plain. This demanded a careful and comprehensive response to the site’s many challenges. Being a former coal extraction site, the contamination of the ground is an ‘issue’, as is the enormous presence of ‘Oddball’, the largest walking dragline excavator in Western Europe whose brooding presence dominates the skyline. Oddball is not easy to move. She weighs 1,200 tonnes.