6 minute read
A new Ice Age
View of Lee Valley Ice Centre. © J A Milewska, LDA Design
When it comes to climate, nature recovery and creating greater social equity, most acknowledge that business as usual is nowhere near enough. Innovation and new thinking are needed at every turn.
Lee Valley Ice Centre (LVIC) now provides two Olympic-sized ice rinks, suitable for elite skaters as well as everyone else, a gym, studios, café, and community space. This new building replaces a near windowless 1980s single rink venue used a lot by local people but which was at the end of its operational life. It doubles the previous capacity to over half a million people a year. Olympic gold-medallist and president of British Ice Skating, Robin Cousins, said the Centre was the perfect place to launch Skate UK, a new national learn-to-skate programme.
LVIC is a significant investment and a win for the community. If the story ended there it would still be a good one. But in every way, the LVIC story is one of reinvention and doing things differently.
The site is adjacent to the River Lea in Waltham Forest and to Walthamstow Marsh Nature Reserve, which is one of the last remaining examples of London’s once widespread floodplain grasslands. The old centre, with its amenity lawns and extensive car parking, never formed part of the history of the place. LDA Design is responsible for a £1.5m landscape transformation to realise the site’s ecological potential and let typical marshland species recolonise the site. The ambition is to make nature and climate awareness part of the visitor experience.
Both the striking new building, by architects Faulkner-Browns, and the landscape have been designed to use water carefully and recycle it wherever possible. This includes, for the first time ever in the UK, ice melt. In a busy rink, the ice is resurfaced up to ten times a day, with the top layers scraped off to create a smooth surface. Up to 16m³ of ice shavings will be created each day from these two ice rinks. The old ice centre disposed of the shavings in the traditional way, discharging the melt water into the sewerage system. With Expedition Engineering, LDA Design has devised a system to reuse the ice melt, saving up to six million litres of water a year. This sets a benchmark for future ice rink developments.
The ice melt is treated by filtering through constructed wetlands with ecologically rich ponds, including two ponds at the main entrance to the Ice Centre. They all feature plants native to the marshes which lie just behind the Centre. A mixture of open water and surface leaf cover, as well as shallow banks and vertical plants, attract birds and mammals and provide breeding habitat and cover from predators.
Following final approval from the Environment Agency, the cleaned water creates a fresh flow to improve water quality in a currently near stagnant oxbow lake on the River Lea. Oxygenation of water in the lake will support efforts by the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority to reintroduce the European otter there. A holt has been installed in the lake and it is hoped that once the water is healthy and capable of supporting fish and plant life, a pair of otters currently surveying the banks of the River Lea will choose to set up home there.
Ice melt water is also being used to establish plants in the beds along the gabion walls around the perimeter of the building. Climbers like roses, honeysuckle, hop and ivy will cover the walls and create a microclimate for mosses and lichens, providing a variety of food sources and hiding spaces for invertebrates, birds, bats, amphibians, and reptiles. Four months after the Centre’s opening, grass snakes have been spotted retreating into the gabion walls – exactly what the walls were designed for.
The project is supported by a wider exemplar surface water drainage strategy which maximises the volume of water clean enough to be allowed into the River Lea and helps to manage flood risk. Rainwater is also reused. A key benefit of this pioneering approach is a significant reduction in the energy use and carbon emissions which arise from the pumping and treatment associated with discharging of ice melt to the sewerage system.
LVIC was an early adopter of biodiversity net gain and urban greening factor standards, and LDA Design worked closely with London Borough of Waltham Forest (LBWF) to deliver exceptional levels of ecological gain: 35% for biodiversity net gain, over three times the government standard, and 0.6 for urban greening, double the requirement. This was achieved by replacing the amenity lawns and overspill car park with wildflower meadows and adding generous swales in the site’s only car park. The Centre recently received a special ‘London in Bloom’ Gold.
The new Centre gives visitors to use elite-level sports and training facilities, but also to immerse themselves in a thriving ecology. A green corridor along the site’s northern edge allows invertebrates, amphibians, reptiles, and small mammals to move between the woodlands to the east and the west. Over 150 native trees have been planted including local cuttings of black poplars (Populus Nigra) which traditionally marked the field boundaries on floodplains such as Walthamstow Marshes. There are swift boxes in the building façade, insect hotels in the bicycle shelters, and hedgehog shelters in the woodland. Rare and threatened bumblebees have already been sighted. All this has encouraged LBWF to include an annual biodiversity awareness education programme for up to 30 schools and local groups as part of community activity at the centre over the next ten years.
LVIC aims to set a new UK design standard, bucking a trend which is unfortunately seeing leisure centres threatened with closure. It shows what good looks like. It means that London has gained a great ice rink in harmony with its glorious, ecologically rich setting.
Joanna Asia Milewska is a landscape architect with LDA Design. Recent projects include the BREEAM Outstanding Ravelin Sports Centre for the University of Portsmouth and Lee Valley Ice Centre.
