The former Cable and Wireless College at 320 Westwood Heath Road is perhaps one of the most attractive buildings in Coventry. It won awards when it was first opened, but now stands empty and forlorn. We wonder what its future will be.
It was built between October 1991 and September 1993 and was designed by Architect David Prichard, then of MacCormac, Jamieson and Prichard in London. When it was completed in 1993 it won the Royal fine Arts Commission / Sunday Times Building of the Year award for 1994.
It also won awards from the Civic Trust, British Association of Landscape and RIBA.
The building comprised twenty classrooms, twenty-two technical training rooms, a well-equipped library, 168 bedrooms in nine houses, a restaurant and a fully equipped leisure centre with a 25-metre pool, a sports hall, squash courts, gym, sauna and café-bar.
It comprised three building blocks, a single storey teaching block to the south of the sits, a three-storey admin and residential block to the north, with the sports and leisure block to the east.
It was described as a ‘modern monastery’, split into small scale pavilions, court and bays, with cloistered walks and pools reminiscent of ancient Indian gardens. ‘The building has some of the characteristics both of an English country house and for the prototype for a palladian villa’. ‘Without doubt it is the curving roofscape which distinguishes this building from any other (ARUP Journal)’.
Jonathan Glancey, writing in the Independent in June 1994, said “The Cable & Wireless College on the outskirts of Coventry is one of the best new buildings in Europe. This is not just because it is glorious to look at. With its waves of sea-green tiled roofs, elliptical entrance courtyard, Mogul-inspired Garden and unexpected use of rich colour, it could hardly be anything else.”
The building was transformed into a commercial training and conference centre in 2001 and purchased by Network Rail as their UK conference and training centre in 2005. Following some limited refurbishment at purchase, there was a more extensive refurbishment of the building in 2012 to address some of the problems with the original design.
Although the natural lighting and ventilation approach to the original design was at the forefront of current design, the actual energy performance of the building was below par and some of the spaces were not what was needed by that time. The refurbishment was carried out by Corstorphine & Wright.
More than 4,000 employees in supervisory and management roles used the centre in which Network Rail had invested £20million. It was renamed the Westwood Leadership Centre, Network Rail used the site for training while working in partnership with the nearby University of Warwick.
The building is locally listed and the Twentieth Century Society is currently considering the opportunity for national listing.
In October 2022, the local press reported that National Rail was set to leave the building at the end of the year, after more than 17 years at the centre.
The site has now been vacant for eighteen months and is getting to look overgrown and at risk. Our Vice Chair, Peter Walters, visited recently and said “Weeds growing out of roofs and paving all over the place. Lichen growing on the walls. It looks utterly abandoned.”
A sad state for such an innovative and important building.