Crewe Rewoven: Where Threads & Tracks Meet
This final year project proposes a new heritage centre that celebrates the town’s industrial legacy while championing low-carbon construction and social inclusivity. The design embraces the concept of adaptive reuse: salvaging and re-interpreting the structural steel from the site’s previous heritage building to form a robust yet expressive framework for renewal.
The building honours two key threads of Crewe’s past: its role as a hub for railway engineering and its overlooked textile manufacturing history, particularly the stories of women like Ada Nield Chew, a local suffragette and former factory worker. Her narrative forms the backbone of the centre’s ethos, inviting visitors to engage with histories of labour, gender, and civic reform through architecture.
The proposal takes cues from both railway typologies and textile forms. A central exhibition spine, inspired by the linear logic of locomotives, threads together multiple volumes, including the Engine Hall with a metre-long locomotive and Nield Hall, where fabric installations hang from the ceiling to provide shade and spectacle. The spaces are designed to blur the line between exhibition, rest, and interaction.
Materiality plays a critical role in rooting the building in place. A palette of reclaimed Cheshire brick, coloured zinc standing seam cladding, and oak-framed windows reflects the craftsmanship of Crewe’s railway workshops and factory buildings. The pleated zinc form, resembling draped fabric, gives the structure a tactile, almost woven appearance.
Beyond its technical and material considerations, the building is a socially driven project. It aims to reconnect residents with their town’s layered history, offering a space that is open, participatory, and reflective of shared heritage.
This new heritage centre is not a static monument, but a responsive and evolving place of making, remembering, and gathering, designed to grow with the community it serves.
