Scottish Borders Council (SBC) is holding an exhibition on Thursday, 2 December from 3pm-9pm at the existing West Linton Primary School to give members of the community the opportunity to find out more about the revised proposal for the new Primary School.

Following an earlier exhibition in April 2010 for the new school at Robinsland, the community expressed that the new school should be on the south side of the school site. Preservation of the existing playing field was seen as a key factor in this decision.

The design of the school was developed further during the summer based on this decision with the intention of submitting a planning application in early Autumn. However, the design at that stage was not able to overcome the constraints of placing a building so far away from the centre of village.

Steven Renwick, Project Manager said: “We were just not able to address issues such as mass, scale and orientation of the building at that stage and this caused us a problem. As a Council we have set ourselves a very high quality benchmark with our recent new primary and secondary buildings and we needed to make sure that we continued to reach this expectation with the new school in West Linton.”

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The project team turned to Archial Architects who successfully designed the primary schools for Kingsland, Lauder and the new Clovenfords Primary School - which has just started on site. Archial came in at short notice, reappraised the site and presented SBC with a new building proposal with the main building on the northern side of the plot.

The new design will offer a single storey building with a frontage set back from Deanfoot Road to provide a domestic scale building. The mass has been broken up by three south facing teaching wings leading away from a central internal ‘street’.

There will be 12 classrooms, all with external access to the playground which naturally leads towards the formal playing field now positioned on the south of the site. This provides natural light and ventilation benefits to each classroom. A simple palette of materials with natural stone and timber on the Deanfoot Road frontage will enable the building to form a real connection with the conservation village centre nearby.

Steven added: “I know that this revised proposal is different in many ways from April and in our view overcomes the hurdles that a south layout presented. The team firmly believe that this revised proposal will provide the village of West Linton with a building that reaches this high benchmark. I would like the community to come along to the exhibition on 2 December so that the design team and I can explain our proposal.”

(GK)