Bristol Memorial Stadium Regeneration: Sustainability Appraisal

Services Provided

Bristol Rovers Football Club is proposing to redevelop the existing Memorial Stadium in Bristol, providing a mixed use scheme comprising a modern stadium facility with over six hundred housing units and a mixture of retail, hotel, leisure and community facilities.   As part of the planning application, Temple prepared an independent evaluation of the sustainability of the development proposal, together with a separate detailed noise impact assessment. 

Sustainability Appraisal

The Sustainability Appraisal examined the extent to which the development either supports or deviates from the principles of sustainable development.  It adopted similar principles to appraisals of plans or programmes, in the context of a physical development project, including:

• A review of national, regional and local policies and strategies relevant to sustainable development.
• Using this review to identify the key sustainability issues and to adopt a series of sustainability objectives for the Football Club.
• Developing an appraisal framework against which the stadium regeneration scheme was assessed.  The range of topics included energy, waste, water, pollution, materials, transport, and a range of other social and economic topics such as public realm and social needs.

Benefits

The sustainability statement concluded that the application made a positive contribution to the overall principles of sustainable development.  The sustainability appraisal itself played an important role in this, by drawing the attention of the developer and architect to those elements of the scheme that needed to be improved in terms of sustainability.  Through team meetings and draft versions of the appraisal, a number of refinements and commitments were made, which improve the overall sustainability of the proposal.

The sustainability appraisal helped the client and the development achieve the following goals:

• Avoid unnecessary environmental, social and economic harm: the appraisal did not identify any negative or harmful sustainability impacts
• Reduce the effects of environmental, social and economic harm where it cannot be avoided (mitigation): the appraisal sought to improve the performance of the regeneration scheme as far as possible.  As a result, the scheme will now seek to investigate or commit to examples of best practice, for example through undertaking a feasibility study into sources of renewable energy supply.
• Compensate for residual environmental, social and economic effects that cannot be further reduced: although certain elements of the scheme make neither a real positive or negative impact on sustainability (for example, the scheme neither created nor reduced open space and biodiversity), these are compensated for by other elements such as the provision of housing, and a mixed use, well designed development.

Sustainability appraisal is a means of evaluating and iteratively improving the design and sustainability performance of a development scheme.  Temple brought together a range of parties – including the developer, architects, and local planning officers – in developing the appraisal.  The statement will be presented as part of the planning application process, which represents not only a high quality, mixed use facility but also a sustainable one.