Hull Central Fire Station ready to serve the community

The new Spring Street Central station replaces the Worship Street (Central) station which was the oldest Fire Station in the Humberside area, providing a new training hub, meeting accommodation, high specification gym and rest areas. The station is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week so required sleeping accommodation for four watches, each with six crew members. One of the challenges faced was, as the station is situated in the heart of the city in a high traffic flow area, it was essential to the design that multiple entrance and exit points were incorporated to enable the crews to avoid congested traffic and intern speed up response times. This was key as many significant historic buildings, museums and Hull Royal Infirmary fall within the stations’ catchment area.

Jefferson Sheard have also designed and delivered a Retained Duty Station (RDS) at Brough, crewed by on-call firefighters within a five-mile radius. As the site is only meters away from the Humber estuary and situated on a critical flood zone, it was imperative to the design that sufficient flood protection measures were incorporated.

The two facilities presented their own unique design challenges and site context which resulted in Jefferson Sheard Architects delivering two distinctly different schemes tailored to the needs of each station. Whilst very different in some respects, both stations have adapted the same design ethos such as integrated ladder training facilities for the fire crews as part of the fabric of the buildings. It was also important to our client that in addition to being fire stations, that both facilities contribute further to the local communities. To fulfil this, both also function as an accessible resource and have been designed to present an inviting and open front entrance to encourage visitors offering access to gym areas and IT learning facilities to support community training initiatives and courses.