Hertford College

Principle Designer Kitchen Project

Our longstanding client, Hertford College, asked us to appraise the efficiency and location of their current catering arrangements. They were facing practicality issues as their kitchens were located in the basement of the College’s main Catte Street premises whilst the main dining hall stands on the first floor, meaning college continually faced problems with delivering hot food.

In response, Ian Bridge Consultancy undertook an options appraisal and feasibility to determine how catering arrangements could be improved. This involved the deployment of kitchen design specialists, services engineers and structural engineers. In addition, we commissioned a full, measured survey of part of the college premises and drew up a scheme of proposals.

We ultimately recommended a relocation of new college kitchens to a location immediately adjoining the dining hall. In addition, we suggested that the old kitchen space could be refurbished into administrative office accommodation.

During the relocation process, we were faced with a number of key issues that we worked to overcome. There was concern over how to extract kitchen fumes through the grade two historic fabric of the building and we assessed that there would have to be an upgrade to electrical services . We created an appraisal to assess the impact of the work on college operations and programmed any proposed works to minimise disruption to college activities, in particular to the summer school programmes.