Spenborough Valley Leisure Centre

Demolished 2019. Facing a group of hillside social housing also by the practice, here is another pool by the disgraced John Poulson, who leveraged a north-east monopoly on this building type. It sat powerfully on Bradford Road, its muscular linearity creating a boundary to the playing fields behind. The projecting roof form sloped upwards away from the road and counterbalanced the raked structure of the ground level concrete beams. The cuboid protrusions were pleasingly asymmetrically disposed in a careful formal composition. When compared to the leisure centres of today this scheme was imbued with an architecture beyond that of the box, despite its municipal nature it was far from mundane. As one Facebook user and citizen of Kirklees put it, ‘the new one has alot [sic] to live up to’.