Hay Castle wins AJ Retrofit & Reuse Awards 2024!
This project scored highly on collaboration and the engagement of the local community – not least in the tracing and return of lost material such as roof tiles from around the town and surrounding area that had previously been salvaged from the ruin.
Named Welsh building of the year earlier this year by the Royal Society of Architects in Wales (RSAW), this project, carried out for the Hay Castle Trust between 2015-2022, involved the extensive conservation-led renovation of Hay-on-Wye’s Grade I-listed 12th century castle. And for the first time in 900 years, this castle is now open to the public.
MICA Architects transformed the castle’s existing buildings from varying degrees of unsafe and dangerous disrepair, restoring its medieval keep and Jacobean mansion, re-opening its ancient gate and installing a museum-standard gallery and new high-level viewing platform in the keep.
In 2011, a trust was formed with the vision to reimagine Hay’s future for wider benefit. MICA took a masterplan-approach, supporting by the trust’s business plan, to ensure principle works delivered a comprehensive, adaptable first phase, leading to isolated conservation and growth phases.
Works involved restoring the ancient gates, retrofitting the triple-height twice-fire-damaged castle-house, and enlivening accessibility of the promontory, with robust materials and easy-to-maintain technologies.
The environmental strategy predicated retrofit principles whilst sensitive to statutory protections, and conservation, many technologies being impossible. A year’s environmental recordings led to the proposal exploiting mass-walling, traditional ventilation/drying methods with continuous heating and lime-repointed/breathable walls.
Hay Castle is an exemplar for listed settings incorporating low-tech and heritage-based improvements and the judges deemed it a carefully judged and kind mixture of retention, restoration and reimagination of elements to create a new focus for the town.
‘It’s an extraordinary achievement to have started with so little and out of this create what has come to be a self-sustaining project and new community and cultural centre,’ they said.
‘It brings back into use a very historic building that was otherwise in danger of disappearing.’
‘A very intelligent and very careful project,’
Commented by judges Helen Grassly, director, Burrell Foley Fisher,
Julian Harrap, founder, Julian Harrap Architects
Sela-Jaymes Taylor, heritage and conservation lead, Gort Scott
AJ article on Hay Castle winning AJ Retrofit & Reuse Awards 2024
