Project Description
The Great Fen Visitors Centre, Cambridgeshire
Our approach to the Visitors Centre is conceived as a journey through the fens providing visitors with a unique landscape in microcosm experience, to provoke thought and engagement with the rejuvenating Fenland landscape.
The journey starts with the sea, the element responsible for creating the fens thousands of years ago.
Visitors enter between two raised pools (set to actual sea level) and descend metaphorically below this (sea) level into a series of six interconnecting natural Fenland landscapes.
Each is accompanied by its own pavilion, accommodating the Centre’s programme, and allowing shelter whilst the viewer contemplates the journey through the landscape, rather like a Japanese garden.
By connecting all the pavilions on an axial route, the visitor centre literally grows out of the landscape journey, which culminates with the lowest and most spectacular of the fenland landscape types – the mere, allowing extensive views over the wider Great Fen landscape of the future.
Facts + Figures
Client: The Great Fen Partnership
Location: Ramsey Heights, Cambridgeshire
Construction cost: £2 million
Area: 700m²
Programme: Competition
