Canaan Lane Primary School, Edinburgh

Canaan Lane Primary School, Edinburgh

Client: City of Edinburgh Council
Architect: Holmes Miller
Cost: £11.0m

Canaan Lane Primary school is the third of the City of Edinburgh Council Schools to be delivered. It is located on a challenging site within the heart of a conservation area in Morningside. the school site is currently a care home and this is to be demolished as part of the works. In addition there is an adjacent existing building on the site which is to form part of the annexe of the school. This is currently functioning as a school and will be maintained as such during the construction of the main school. The new school construction is a steel frame on shallow foundations which has been designed to sympathetically fit within the conservation area. This includes areas of natural stone cladding as well as decorative precast concrete elements. The school design has been developed on the same principals as the other schools but the process of the design has been smoother as we have already learned lessons from the first two schools which we have been applying here. On this site the connection to the Scottish water sewer was particularly challenging. New guidance from Scottish Water meant that they were not going to allow us to connect to the sewer, which runs in the road adjacent to the school.

Through teamwork with our client and Scottish water we have been able to achieve a waiver for this site which has saved the client the considerable cost and time implications of connecting to a burn some distance from the site. Another key challenge with this site’s location is the logistics of constructing the school. The site is located down a one way street and is bounded on both sides by either a historic wall or historic tenements. We have worked alongside the main contractor to detail the school for ease of construction. We have also assisted the client with provision of the temporary diversions that will be required to allow the Deanbank Annex to continue to function as a school during the construction of the main works.