Cambridge's largest Passivhaus student development, Hinsley Lane, has achieved certification.
Commissioned by St John's College, Cambridge and designed by Architects Allies and Morrison, the project harks back to the traditional college setting, providing 39 new red brick terraced townhouses set within shared gardens.
Certified by PHT Patron Max Fordham, the development houses students from St John’s, Lucy Cavendish and Clare Hall, which can also lease these rooms to Senior Members of the College, creating an unusual mixed academic community.
Hinsley Lane offers a thoughtful alternative to the current high rise UK student housing template. The development demonstrates the important connection between the built environment and green space, with orientation and layout playing a central role in its environmental strategy.
Terraces are arranged on a north/south axis, ensuring that every unit benefits from a south-facing rear elevation to maximise daylight and passive solar gain. Optimised for environmental performance, the buildings orientation, shading, window sizing and ventilation all work hard to balance summer comfort with winter efficiency. Linear communal gardens run between the terraces, fostering both biodiversity and social space and incorporating mature trees from the site’s previous life as an agricultural estate for St John’s.
The houses are all carefully designed to combine comfort, sustainability and community with three key typologies:
- a seven-bedroom house with an attic room on the third floor
- an accessible six-bedroom end-of-terrace over three storeys
- a four-bedroom house also over three storeys
The form of construction for the townhouses incorporates piled foundations and thermally broken insitu reinforced concrete slabs, CLT super-structures with CLT window frames and pitched roofs with dormer window insertions, high performance windows, and doors, facing brickwork cavity walls, hung clay tiled facades and roof coverings.
With a low carbon CLT structure the building fabric is highly efficient, achieving airtightness levels as low as 0.08ACH - far below Passivhaus requirements. These high-performance buildings minimise heat loss and lower operational carbon, representing a significant long-term benefit for St John's College, neighbouring colleges and the students living at Hinsley Lane.
With a £6.3 million services value, heating and hot water are provided by air-source heat-pumps. Photovoltaic panels are located on selected south facing roof slopes with diverters to divert electricity generated to the heat-pumps. Ventilation and heat recovery (MVHR) is provided with a series of chimneys serving as sources of intake and extract.
