A new residential building for young people with mental illness, autism, and learning difficulties at St Andrew’s Healthcare’s Northampton site will be Europe’s largest facility of its kind when it opens this autumn, the charity and psychiatric services provider says.
Designed by P+HS Architects, FitzRoy House will house purpose-built residential facilities, sports and therapy areas, a café, courtyards with outdoor activity spaces, and landscaped gardens. It will also incorporate a modern new facility for St Andrew’s College – the charity’s OFSTED ‘outstanding’ school – equipped with teaching rooms with better access to technology, a science demonstration room, a new library, an outdoor education area, a bespoke music room, and a recording studio. ‘Ground-breaking’ treatment offered will include sensory integration techniques and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, specially adapted for young people.
Staff and invited guests gathered in mid- October to celebrate the ‘topping out’. At a ceremony on the new building’s roof, St Andrew’s Healthcare chairman, Peter Winslow, thanked everyone involved in the project, before CEO, Gil Baldwin, attached the first piece of stone coping to the building. Guests included Sean Bowles, MD of contractors Galliford Try, Cath Lake, of P+HS Architects, who designed the building, and MP for Northampton South, David Mackintosh.