RICS Social Impact Award for Life Kitchen

We are delighted that Life Kitchen at the Lodge, Sunderland, for which we were contractor, has been named winner of the Leisure category and Project of the Year at the inaugural RICS Social Impact Awards North East.

We worked in collaboration with the North East build community to restore the Grade II listed Victorian Mowbray Park Lodge, with everyone involved giving their time for free.

The lodge now houses the cookery school founded by food writer Ryan Ryley. The charity helps people with cancer to recover their sense of taste which can be affected by the treatment they receive.

The recipes and cookery skills offered are designed to help people enjoy food again.

The judges said: “Life Kitchen is an innovative, free UK cooking school to help people and their families living with cancer provide skills to restore the pleasure they get from food by focusing on taste. This innovative leisure activity has received international recognition and has a huge social impact across a broad range of user groups from its base at The Lodge. Sunderland. The scale of project impact stands on the precipice of significant expansion to further enhance its social impact.”

These new RICS awards aim to put the spotlight on the individuals and projects making lives better through innovation and collaboration, and celebrate the lasting impact that property professionals can have on communities.

Construction Excellence North East (CENE) Awards

Life Kitchen is one of two of our recent projects to be nominated for Construction Excellence North East (CENE) Awards.

Between it and the Frederick Douglass Centre (FDC) in Newcastle, we have been nominated in a total of seven award categories.

We were lead contractor on the FDC, which has been shortlisted for the Integration and Collaborative Working, Value, Sustainability, and Building Project of the Year awards. 

Part of Newcastle Helix, a new 24-acre hybrid city centre quarter, the building provides Newcastle University with state-of-the-art teaching facilities and features a UK first for auditorium design. A fully automated moveable wall solution which works with raked seating, allows the 750-seat space to be divided in two while delivering the level of noise separation required.

The Life Kitchen is shortlisted in the following three categories: Conservation and Regeneration, Innovation, and Building Project of the Year. 

We are very proud of all those involved in these two very different projects and are keeping our fingers ahead of the announcement of the award winners in June.