National award for new St Margaret’s bus station

LEICESTER’S new St Margaret’s Bus Station has scooped its first national award.

The £14.3million bus station redevelopment project took the top spot in the infrastructure and transportrelated development category of the Future Cities Forum Winter Awards 2022.

Judges praised the ambition of the bus station redevelopment and the way major elements of the previous building were reused to help cut the carbon cost of construction.

Helen Taylor, Director of Practice at Scott Brownrigg and a member of the judging panel, said: “‘I loved that fact that they had taken what was there at St Margaret’s Bus Station and made it better.”

Fellow judge Deborah Williams, Head of Region – Midlands, Historic England, added: “Typically, rail stations get lots of attention, and bus stations are ‘also rans’. It’s the fact that they have created a sense of place in this part of Leicester that is really laudable.”

The new landmark St Margaret’s Bus Station building creates a striking gateway into the centre of the city. It features a glazed concourse to maximise natural lighting and cut energy consumption and a curved aluminium roof where a solar array of 390 photovoltaic panels generate more clean, green power than is needed to run the building.

The building has an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) with the highest possible rating of A+ and a score of -4. This means that the new bus station building will be better than net zero carbon in terms of its operational emissions. It is the first net zero carbon bus station building in the UK.

Bus passengers benefit from a completely redesigned, improved and more spacious internal layout with better seating, a new café, modern toilets complete with a Changing Places accessible facility, and real-time digital passenger information. The new building also provides significantly more capacity