Carterton Safety Centre >
The new, purpose built Community Safety Centre will be an on-call fire station, offering 24 hour emergency service availability for Oxfordshire Fire & Rescue Service (OFRS). The Centre will be sited on the edge of the Bloor Homes residential development. This project will deliver a new fire station, training facility and emergency services hub, delivering a key requirement of the West Oxfordshire Local Plan 2031.
LOCATION: CARTERTON, OXFORDSHIRE
ARCHITECTS: CPMG ARCHITECTS
PROJECT VALUE: CONFIDENTIAL
DATE: 2025
The Challenge
The building will consist of two parts: the main accommodation and an adjacent two-bay Appliance Bay housing the fire engine. In addition, a 3-storey smoke house training building is located within the training yard. SOLID was appointed as civil and structural engineers for the Safety Centre project, which involved detailed surface level modelling and the design of both surface water and foul drainage networks, in close collaboration with Oxfordshire County Council.
One of the key challenges was ensuring that the surface water network could manage the sudden, high-volume discharges from the training yard during operational exercises. Large fire trucks can release substantial volumes of water instantaneously, and the network had to handle this without the need for oversized drainage components.
The SOLID Approach
To achieve this, we designed a series of storage features to regulate and manage flow. A swale was incorporated to provide attenuation, water treatment, and flow control, while an offline underground storage tank was installed to accommodate the instantaneous surges from fire truck discharges. With fixed discharge rates and invert levels to adhere to, the surface water network required careful, precise design to meet these constraints.