A Thought Leader by Mike Worthington.
The original content in this article is by Eurban Limited, and was first published on LinkedIn as part of Eurban’s ‘Thought Leader’ series on mass timber construction. Copyright: Eurban Limited/Mike Worthington/Eve Dennehy.
In 2023, working closely with Snug Architects, Eurban were proud to be the Mass Timber Specialist for Hope Street – a progressive pilot project for One Small Thing (OST) a charity that supports a trauma informed alternative to custodial prison sentences for women.
Hope Street has received many accolades including winning a 2024 Civic Trust Award as well as the 2024 RIBA MacEwan Award when the judges described the project as ‘Architecture that is healing people’ and ‘a generous and visionary scheme that almost had one of the judges in tears.’
In September of this year, Eurban were honoured to welcome Mike Worthington as a guest contributor to their series of LinkedIn Thought Leaders. Mike, is a former Director of Snug Architects and was the project lead for Hope Street. In this article he shares the way in which Trauma Informed Design principles influenced the building’s design and the key role played by the CLT structure in the creation of a calming, healing environment of trust. Since leaving Snug Architects, Mike has gone on to found People Architects in Southampton.
Thought Leader
Most women caught up in the justice system are not violent offenders, many will be primary care givers for children and will have experienced trauma in their lives. Hope Street has been designed to provide a radically different service for these women and during their stay there, they will be helped to work through their trauma with counselling as well as being provided with opportunities to develop new life skills.
The breakout space in the Hope Suite; © Fotohaus
The architecture of Hope Street is grounded in Trauma Informed Design (TID) principles that begin by recognizing that buildings affect people and communicate messages, such as how people should be treated and who holds the power. In TID, the building itself needs to become a tool in the work of healing from trauma, therefore Hope Street has been designed to give a feeling of informality, but with high quality materiality. It has been organised in a way that, even on approaching the front entrance, a message is expressed to the women that says, ‘you are important.’
Located in a residential area of Southampton, Hope Street allows them to remain in the community and, crucially, to keep their children with them instead of perpetuating their experience of trauma by the separation of families which is more usual in the criminal justice system.
The scheme, which is formed of Cross Laminated Timber (CLT), comprises a street facing ‘Hub’ building with a residential building to the rear and a landscaped therapeutic garden between. The Hub is formed of three domestic-type buildings with an intentionally childlike expression of their asymmetrical roofs. This is a key design feature that immediately communicates that this is a relaxed, comfortable building and not the usual institutional architecture of authority and control. On the ground floor is a coffee shop open to the community that provides work opportunities for the women, along with the main oak-lined entrance, a welcome lounge and a second controlled entry door which provides a discreet, welcoming entrance to women arriving from Court.
The upper three volumes are occupied by office spaces and large seminar rooms used for multi-agency working. Significantly, the primary upstairs location or ‘architectural position of power’ is occupied by The Hope Suite, a space used solely for trauma informed group counselling. This large, vaulted, light filled room features a large rooflight and windows that look out across the garden; it has a church like quality that feels very different to the rest of the building. Exposed CLT on the walls and soffits are part of an overall biophilic approach and give the space the feeling of a timber cocoon. A spine wall clad in an acoustic timber baton system enhances and softens the acoustic.
The five key principles of Trauma Informed Design (TID) were first established in 2016 by American psychologists Harris and Fallot who defined them as safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration and empowerment. Taking these principles as our starting point, our approach was to ask ourselves a lot of questions. We started with ‘what does this building need to achieve in order to support One Small Thing’s service so that trust is created for counselling and relationships can be created between individuals and wider society?’ How can it convey the messages ‘give us a chance,’ ‘we’re not the same as an institution’ and ‘this can be a turning point for you into something different?’
Approaching it this way meant we would be able to point to how the building has delivered on those key principles and this is informing a Post Occupancy Assessment currently being conducted by the University of Greenwich, for which they are also undertaking spatial mapping with the women.
To achieve the TID aims we had identified, we incorporated a lot of cues into the design including big organizational points around public and private spaces – more on this later. We were lucky to be able to think from first principles about how to design a new building rather than considering how to improve and extend an existing custody suite or community prison. Therefore, we were able to take an even more radical starting point by asking ourselves ‘what is this building’s response going to be to trauma?’ It was clear to us that as well as being secure, it needed to feel like home and to provide sanctuary and community, because that’s what would enable the creation of an environment of trust.
The asymmetrical roof line communicates a relaxed, informal message to women arriving from Court; © Fotohaus
Once we had established this principle, we looked at how we could continue to reinforce it by the macro and the micro decisions and this is where materiality and CLT comes into it. CLT not only has the important programme and environmental benefits; its natural warmth and beauty play a key role in creating the biophilic healing environment. It has long been recognised that wood’s biophilic properties can have a positive impact on health and wellbeing by improving internal air quality, reducing stress levels – even reportedly lowering heart rate and blood pressure, and giving a sense of connection to nature. We knew it was the perfect material for Hope Street and we asked ourselves ‘what is CLT’s role? The answer was, ‘let’s use it where it can play it’s orchestral note in this piece.’ Which it does, beautifully.
We also understood that the individual relationships between the women, their case workers and the One Small Thing staff was going to be fundamental. This factor would dominate the experience of Hope Street for the women, so rather than tackling each of the key principles separately, we thought about the role of the building in supporting this.
We knew it needed to be an environment that built trust, which would express to the women that they are valued, so first impressions were going to be very important. If someone’s lived experience of the justice system is that of feeling depersonalised, processed and not trusted, the approach to the building would need to evoke a different feeling of ‘maybe I’m going to be welcomed, not managed.’ In response to this we used a domestic architecture to create a welcoming, open frontage with the café space fronting onto the street and the three ‘villas’ with their informal and playful roofline, instead of the usual neo-classical doric columns and pedestals of a typical institution where the architecture says, ‘we’re in power.’
Internally we layered the public and private space in a way that allows the architecture to speak of the overall aim to achieve sanctuary for the women and maintain their place in society. The organising principles of sanctuary to community and private to public space are very evident. This starts at the front of the building where, in addition to the main public entrance, there is also a second, private entrance that allows the women their dignity when they first arrive from court in, what is likely to be, an emotional state. Here they can be welcomed in a way that allows them time to gather themselves, meet one of the One Small Thing team and start making choices about things that they might need for their stay.
The therapeutic garden is overlooked by the Hope Suite; © Fotohaus
However, the journey of reintegration and healing really starts at the rear of the building where the bedrooms are located. These are smaller, more modest places of sanctuary – their own private space. From there, they come forward into the shared living spaces that look out to the garden, then on into the communal living and visitor spaces and through towards the public spaces of the activity room and the café which are overlapping with society.
Having the main therapeutic space, The Hope Room, on the first floor allows for a physical separation between living spaces and the place where painful, traumatic experiences are discussed. In this most trauma affected space, the CLT structure is fully exposed contributing significantly to the creation of a calming, healing environment which feels warm and textured, yet its mass gives a sense of permanence and safety for the women to share their traumatic experiences.
Hope Street raises the question of how society overall might benefit from the general application of TID principles to the design of new and retrofitting of existing institutional buildings, especially in a healthcare setting where people feel vulnerable and are likely to experience anxiety or trauma simply because of the nature of the building. These buildings need to engage with trauma in a different way and design should not always be a choice between function and creating a conducive environment, these things can be layered. With society’s increasing recognition that trauma has a profound impact on people’s lives, this is all the more important and architects and designers are looking more at how they can respond in a way that they have never allowed it to influence their decisions before.
Introducing TID elements will not necessarily be overly expensive or complicated, it will be about making the design a little more sophisticated in the same way that we make public buildings accessible for mobility impaired users – achieving it doesn’t take a lot of work, it just needs to be thought through. Our hope is that Hope Street demonstrates this and that we will eventually see a genuine shift in attitude towards the design of our institutional buildings.
