We are very pleased to announce that the Mayville Community Centre won best retrofit earlier this week, in the UK Passivhaus Awards 2012. Congratulations to all involved.

Parsons & Whittley’s highly commendable Wimbish social housing scheme won the Domestic category and the winner of the Non Domestic category was Architype’s Oakmeadow Primary School. Full details of all shortlisted schemes can be found on the Passivhaus Trust website.

These were the inaugural UK Passivhaus Awards, launched by the Passivhaus Trust to coincide with the trust’s second anniversary to celebrate the achievements of those practices pioneering Passivhaus in the UK and projects were assessed on their performance in the following areas: energy consumption, indoor environment, occupant feedback, design philosophy innovation, aesthetics and other sustainability features. The objective of the awards is to promote the Passivhaus standard in the UK and to highlight that Passivhaus can apply to any building type of any function and size and that Passivhaus design can create beautiful buildings. Dr Wolfgang Feist, co-founder of the Passivhaus standard, was on the judging panel and present at the awards. We were especially pleased to be joined, amongst others, by Carol Johnson, Chairman of the Mildmay Community Partnership, who on accepting the award on behalf of us all spoke with a heartfelt “It’s brilliant and we love it!”

This award comes on top of Mayville’s wins in the 3R Awards in 2011 and the Green Build Awards earlier this year and is currently shortlisted for the Constructing Excellence Awards 2012 which will be announced in September. Initial monitoring results show that the centre has been performing in line with and even better than PHPP predictions, which equate to a 95% energy saving during its first winter heating period. The centre’s users have been delighted at the warmth and consistency of temperature throughout the building and yet have found it to be cool and comfortable during recent warm spells.

An opening and renaming ceremony in May was well attended by all those involved in the centre, members of the local community and Islington councillors and the centre is now known as the Mildmay Community Centre, reflecting its importance for the wider Mildmay ward. The centre is thriving, being widely used for regular activities ranging from bingo and Golden Oldies lunches, through to yoga and table tennis, with a number of outside organisations from further afield having used the centre over the past 12 months. Most excitingly, we are looking forward to moving our own office to the centre in a few weeks’ time.

A great selection of photos of the centre taken in June 2012 is available on the Mayville project page on this website.

Presentation photograph Credits: Source Passivhaus Trust, Photography Andrew Perrin