RPS and the Thanet Earth development – Salad Days in Kent
Based in Kent, the garden of England, ‘Thanet Earth’ is an £80m development to grow fresh salad produce. The development is a direct response to shoppers becoming more aware of the environmental impact of food production and distribution.
Thanet Earth will comprise seven huge glasshouses, an on-site packhouse and a visitors centre. The 67 hectares site is 2km north to south and accessed using 4km of highways and pavements. The development will provide around 700 jobs in a depressed employment area. This facility will ensure that fresh UK grown goods will be supplied to the consumer, dramatically reducing the ‘food-miles’ that the goods have travel from ‘the grower to the table’.
RPS was commissioned in August 2007 as designers for the scheme. The team led by Alison Doubell (Associate Director) is providing architectural, civil and structural design and CDM co-ordinator services.
The greenhouses are based on the most advanced Dutch models and each is equipped with its own combined heat & power plant (CHP), which in time will be powered using sustainable fuel. It is anticipated that they will grow salad vegetables including tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers in suspended troughs using insulation as the growing medium. It has excellent properties for maintaining the correct temperature and humidity.
The CHP plant will supply each glasshouse with heat and light for the crop, and excess CO2 generated by the plant will be circulated within the glasshouse to create the optimum environment for growing the crop. The excess energy produced will be sold to the National Grid by a purpose-built STET substation and transformer.
Growing vegetables requires a huge amount of water and in order to be as sustainable as possible all rainwater is collected, used for irrigation and recycled. 200 million gallons of water will be stored on site in seven lagoons.
A mammoth operation is currently underway to move some 900,000m3 of earth and chalk around the site to create the plateaux on which to construct the glasshouses. The design ensures a balance of cut and fill material thereby eliminating off-site haulage of material.
Each glasshouse has space for a house next to it for a ‘resident farmer’, and there is also the possibility of several independent growers sharing a glasshouse. Design of the on-site packhouse has just started and is due to be complete for the first crop.
Planning permission was jeopardised by the possible location of a Saxon burial ground, part of a Bronze Age barrow cemetery and stringent landscaping requirements. The design team revised the site layout accordingly and, in conjunction with Kent Heritage, agreed a methodology of working. A team of up to 45 archaeologists are on site to record and preserve the features unearthed. Archaeologists from RPS Cottons Centre are overseeing the archaeological aspects of the work to ensure programme constraints are met without compromising the archaeology. Currently the archaeological findings include five Bronze Age barrows, a Bronze Age settlement and field-systems, an important Iron Age settlement and trading centre, a Roman farm and over 40 unusual sunken-floored buildings set within their farmyards and fields. RPS Milton Keynes provided the landscaping design.
RPS Cottons Centre have handled the ecology and the footpath diversion and acted as advisors/agents to Thanet District Council.
RPS Newark have also acted as planning consultants for the pack house and substation transformer and undertaken the design of the off-site highways work (Section 278 Agreement)
Contact:
London Cotton St. – P&D
T: +44 (0) 20 7939 8000
Newark – P&D
T: +44 (0) 1636 605 700