The Project Brief

The Redcar & Cleveland Leisure and Community Heart building is a £31 million complex which opened to the public in April 2014. The multi-purpose facility, situated on Ridley Street, Redcar, contains a huge range of community amenities.

This includes, but is not limited to, a six-lane swimming pool, dance halls, debating chambers as well as a council chamber - not to mention various other community facilities. Alongside the main building sits a business centre for entrepreneurs and start-up companies, plus improved car parking.

The building was to contain internal and external timber cladding. It was Duffield’s job to source, machine and supply this timber; a mammoth project, but one that was nonetheless exciting and rewarding.

Duffield Timber’s Solution

The Redcar & Cleveland Leisure and Community Heart represented one of Duffield Timber’s largest-ever Western Red Cedar cladding orders. We machined over 36,000 linear metres of prime Canadian Western Red Cedar cladding to the joinery company’s specification. Having been machined, the cedar was then treated with a fire-retardant finish, known at the time as Dricon Euro Class B.

The vast volumes of timber that required machining and fire-treatment, coupled with the reasonably tight deadlines, demanded a diligent, flexible and efficient approach from team Duffield.

Over the course of two weeks, two teams of four staff members worked shifts starting at 5am. We were required to organise multiple deliveries and collections between our site in Ripon, the fire treatment company as well as Redcar. To facilitate this, we made special planning and adjustments to our regular delivery schedule. All the extra work paid off, however, as the final finished product was in Redcar safely before the deadline.

The Result

There’s no doubting the aesthetic qualities of timber cladding - particularly of Western Red Cedar - and given the scale of the project, we couldn’t be prouder with the final result. Photographs of the completed project speak for themselves.

The building’s beauty attracted some prestigious industry accolades, too, including:

• Winner of the Civic Building of the Year 2015
• RICS North East Regeneration Project of the Year

Next time you’re in Redcar, keep your eyes peeled for the Redcar & Cleveland Leisure and Community Heart building - we have a feeling you won’t be disappointed!