The Egyptian Room underneath Oldham Town Hall, once an unused space yet boasting stunning Victorian architecture, has been transformed into a bustling and popular independent food hall and market. And its new lighting scheme has been key.
Oldham Town Hall is a Grade II listed historic building situated in the centre of Oldham town centre, just outside Manchester.
Built in phases from 1841 onwards, it was designed to accommodate civic and administrative uses as well as police and courts. The building was redeveloped in 2016 as part of a wider regeneration process, including incorporating a multi-screen cinema and family restaurants.
The town hall’s Egyptian Room was once home to the borough treasurer’s Rates Hall but had in more recent years simply been an unused space – a void essentially – located underneath the main building.
Yet, with its floor-to-ceiling glazed tiles, Victorian architecture and double-height vaults, it was a space crying out to be given new life and purpose, as BDP lighting design associate Nick Meddows explains.
‘It is a very impressive space; a very beautiful old room. So, the aspiration was to try and reimagine the space for a food and beverage offering, an independent food market, essentially, which is becoming quite popular these days as a concept,’ he tells Lighting Journal.
The project saw BDP lead as architect, principal designer, civils and structural and environment and building services engineer, and was completed late last year. It was project managed by Turner & Townsend, with MACE working as a quantity surveyor and Studiotech as a key contractor.
The space includes decorative glazed wall and column tiling, timber parquet and terrazzo flooring, decorative coffered plaster ceilings and cornices, original arched windows and timber doors. There is also a kitchen space adjacent to the main with a restored terrazzo floor across part of its footprint.
A key part of its repurposing has, of course, been a new lighting scheme. ‘Within the space there is a mixture of heritage and contemporary structures. So it is almost like you are working to two briefs. You have to try to celebrate the heritage interior at the same time as putting in the right illumination for the more contemporary parts,’ Nick highlights.
The principal aim of the scheme was to provide an atmospheric, functional, comfortable and safe environment for both occupants and visitors, Nick explains, with the space able to serve more than 200 covers across both the indoor and outdoor seating areas. The latter external area provides an al-fresco dining terrace
FESTOON LIGHTING
The lighting, naturally, also needed to enhance the appearance of the architectural features, provide adequate levels of functional and wayfinding illuminance; be sustainable and energy efficient; have good efficacy and colour rendition; and be fully controllable.
Starting with the entrance, while the existing lighting has been by and large retained, festoon lighting has been integrated into the shading umbrellas. This is complemented by a cluster of filament pendants in the entrance portico as you come into the space.
Visually very much a signpost to the space, the pendants are arranged in a grid form but suspended in varying heights. They have been suspended from fabricated lightweight aluminium support frames, which also provide cable routes to the luminaires.
Luminaires have then been suspended through the architectural mesh frames, which enable both the support frame and the services above them to be hidden.
For the stalls, coffee and pizza areas, ceiling track-mounted lighting has been installed with, then additional service counter lighting provided by diffused LED linear lighting. The information blackboard on the front of the stall is also illuminated via linear LED on brackets.
Additional track-mounted lighting has been installed in front of the stalls for general ambient lighting and also by the side door to provide lighting to the waiter’s station (which is located under the stairs).
SUSPENDED AMBIENT LIGHTING
For the seating areas, ambient lighting is provided, again, predominantly by pendants, with a number of large feature pendants centred within the ceiling coffers and suspended all at the same height. Much as in the entrance space, a cluster of filament pendants inside the four columns are located in an orderly grid form but suspended in varying heights.
The bar desks near the entrance have desk-mounted linear luminaires. Shelves at the back of the bar are illuminated, again, by integrated linear LED lighting. The feature glass blocks have been backlit from top and bottom and the original wall tiles highlighted from above by linear wall-washer luminaires. Paintings have been uplit, with dimmable drivers also installed. The toilets and cubicles have been illuminated by ceiling-mounted square-shaped luminaires that fit within board width in the ceiling.
Both stairs in the front-of-house areas have illuminated handrails. The toilet stair lighting has been integrated into the wall recesses above the actual handrail and aimed at 30° towards the stair. The stairs leading to the mezzanine have lighting integrated into the handrail pointing directly downwards.
The main fire lobby area has been illuminated by adjustable recessed luminaires. These have been equipped with spreader lens to provide better beam control and also a fire hood above the ceiling recess to meet fire-safety requirements. A double gimbal luminaire has been focused 25° towards the decorative doors and the single one points downwards towards the original floor.
PROTECTIVE FRAME
As it was not possible to suspend lighting from the decorative heritae ceiling, Studiotech came up with an ingenious solution, Nick highlights, namely to suspended mounting grid/frame at high level.
‘This provided a platform to up-light the soffit and a frame to mount pendants, speakers, sensors etc and conceal power/data. This reduced the quantity of penetrations into the soffit and neatly concealed cabling,’ he explains.
‘To introduce close offset illumination to the columns, StudioTech also delivered a neat free-standing frame detail around the base with integral LED strip,’ he adds.
‘Having a design partner who you can really trust is invaluable for this type of project. Studiotech crunched the detail of it, which sometimes a contractor doesn’t necessarily have the expertise to do,’ Nick continues.
‘The over-arching strategy was warm colour temperatures; there is also a Casambi wireless control system in there, which when we have been back, the client team have got it on their phone and are able to customise the space. Which is really nice to see because if it is just four buttons with no labelling no one ever pushes the buttons to change things. It was really heartening that they were all over the Casambi app and really fine-tuning the space.
‘It is really busy now, even on weekdays or weeknights, so the space very much feels like a success. Hopefully it will be a catalyst for further development in that area of Oldham, too,’ Nick adds.
Photograph by Tom Niven
PROJECT CREDITS
Client: Oldham Metropolitan Borough Council
Project manager: Turner & Townsend
Lighting design: BDP Lighting
Architect: BDP
Main contractor: StudioTech
Quantity surveyor: Mace
Civil and structural engineer: BDP
Environmental and building services engineer: BDP
Principal designer: BDP
This is an abridged version of the article that appears in the May edition of Lighting Journal. To read the full article, simply click on the page-turner to your right.
