HOW LEISURE CENTRES CAN BE A CATALYST FOR REGENERATION

t Morgan Sindall, we’ve seen how large-scale leisure centre projects can sit in the middle of this overlapping Venn diagram of local authority priorities. However, designing, building and operating a leisure centre that provides all the required health facilities while aligning with the location’s aesthetics, infrastructure and local community demand is no easy feat.

The complexity of this challenge, as well as the benefits that can be obtained, was illustrated recently at the new Marina Centre in Great Yarmouth. This £26m facility replaced its 1980s-built predecessor, which was well loved but just wasn’t fit for purpose anymore.

The centre now boasts two swimming pools (one competition standard and one with a moveable floor), and leisure water area including splash play and flumes, as well as a climbing wall zone, four-court sports hall, spin studio, large gym, studios and a cafe that overlooks the pool and nearby beach. As part of the project, the team also built a new 200-space car park, giving the centre an extra 100 spaces.

The scheme is literally built on the beach, and along with its curtain walling it provides panoramic views of the area. Its design allows people to walk seamlessly through the centre from the beach, whether they are using the main facilities or not – making it a more integral part of how residents and tourists move around the town and the coastline.

From the outset, the replacement of the Marina Centre was meant to play a key part in Great Yarmouth’s regeneration plans by strengthening its year-round economic resilience. Like many coastal towns, Great Yarmouth is keen to regain the popularity it enjoyed during the last century and capitalise on UK families rediscovering the joys of staycations – as it is in the seasonal effects of the tourism industry that the town can go from booming to sleeping.

The Marina Centre was, therefore, designed to deliver experiences that would extend beyond its boundaries and benefit the whole coastal front. It would do this by offering a wide range of exciting and accessible facilities as well as by creating a literal connection between the beach and Great Yarmouth’s ‘golden mile’.

This ambition and its outcome was summed up by Sheila Oxtoby, CEO of Great Yarmouth Borough Council, when she said: “When we started on this project, we knew we wanted the new leisure centre to meet the health needs of local people while simultaneously helping Great Yarmouth attract tourists all year round. This was no easy balance but is one I’m delighted to say has been achieved thanks to a great design and operational management, both of which have been tailored to the site, our community and the future of the town.

“The result is a really stunning building, and its popularity is apparent when you speak to residents and visitors who look at it and go “wow, I want to go in there!” People see the flumes and think, ooh, that looks fun. And that’s what it’s all about – we want people to come here, have a great time and, in doing so, boost their health and wellbeing. This shows how the two objectives go hand in hand as, thanks to this appeal, the centre is already fulfilling our ambition of Great Yarmouth being a destination town regardless of the season.”

To achieve this, funding was delivered by the council themselves, drawn in part from a successful £20.1m Towns Fund bid. The project also saw further injections of £2.5m from the Government’s Getting Building Fund, via New Anglia Local Enterprise Partnership, £1.6m from Sport England and £500,000 from Pooled Business Rates.

Since opening in August 2022, some significant returns have already been generated on this investment. The centre has seen over 154,000 individual users, with 20,000 additional people using the cafe and even more going to the centre for access to the amphitheatre seating and its stunning seaside views.

This popularity is having a direct impact on the surrounding businesses and overall appeal of the town, with recent surveys showing that it has helped boost footfall along the coastline by 20% compared to pre-pandemic figures. This is a great indication that the centre, which is not even one year old, is already achieving its goal of helping Great Yarmouth become an all-yearround destination.

This economic benefit is in addition to the fact that 75% of the project’s supply chain was drawn from SME companies in Great Yarmouth during the centre’s construction.

Improved wellbeing levels was another target area for the council, with obesity, particularly in children, being one of their biggest challenges. To ensure that it would help as many people as possible, the council looked at what was happening in other parts of the country during the concept design stage and adjusted plans to reflect these lessons. For example, by working closely with the operators, they made sure the pricing was right, so that along with accessible and inclusively-designed facilities, it wasn’t pricing local residents out. They continue to monitor this and are offering free swimming lessons for children at the centre.

Leisure centres obviously have direct health benefits, but this type of development can also improve wellbeing in other ways, such as helping people learn new skills, boosting their careers and by enhancing local areas.

At Morgan Sindall, we always strive to maximise the social value that our projects can deliver and during this project we generated more than £23m of social value through work experience and apprenticeships, community volunteer projects, charitable work and positive sustainability initiatives. The team that worked on the project were all local and this scheme directly impacted them. So much so, that many returned in the summer to help build a series of communal gardens.

Designing and constructing a facility that delivered all the above was no simple task. For starters, it had to look interesting and be aesthetically sympathetic to its surroundings. Saunders Boston Architects achieved this by designing a building with a striking shape and multiple levels as well as a curved glass facade along the side facing the sea.

The reality of building on the coast also presented several construction challenges. This included the specification and treatment of materials for a marine environment, getting the waterproof concrete for the pools right and dealing with the high ground water table that sits beneath the building.

Internally, aggressive chlorine-laden air could become a problem for building components unless protected. This saw the building’s ‘wet’ area, with the pools, and the ‘dry’ side, with all the other facilities, separated by a membrane consisting of a sheet pile wall that wraps around the building and houses the three pools and the basement containing the filtration systems.

The development was also considerate of the surrounding facilities, as illustrated by the fact that the piling strategy was designed around the needs of the marine life in the nearby SeaLife centre.

Thanks to this hard work, the Marina Centre can now act as a lynchpin within Great Yarmouth’s future refurbishments and community-level upgrades – proving that these schemes work and making a strong argument to double down on local regeneration.

A strategic series of interventions and developments in the pipeline will keep this momentum going. This includes Great Yarmouth recently securing £13.7m from the Future High Streets Fund to rejuvenate the town centre as an economic, cultural and community hub. In addition, the £10m redevelopment of Great Yarmouth’s Winter Gardens looks set to reimagine the iconic landmark and turn it into another year-round visitor attraction.

Sport is often held up as an inspirational ideal, an activity that empowers us to improve and fulfil our potential. At the Great Yarmouth Marina Centre, we’ve seen how leisure centres can extend this transformative power to not just the people using their services – but to the communities and towns in which they’re based.