How St. Catherine’s College managed emergency works on a Grade I listed campus
Miriam Owen, Associate Director at Edgars, shares the key lessons from St. Catherine’s College’s planning journey, offering practical guidance for those managing emergency works in heritage education buildings.
When structural failure threatens both student safety and an institution’s physical legacy, decisions must happen at pace. Yet, in protected environments like St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, urgency must be balanced with procedure.
This was the challenge the College faced when RAAC (Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete) was discovered in the roof of five of its iconic Arne Jacobsen-designed buildings, a discovery that required an immediate response tempered with careful navigation through heritage planning requirements.
While St. Catherine’s College’s situation is unique, with very few listed buildings known to feature RAAC in the UK, the lessons learned apply to any educational estate responsible for managing urgent works in heritage environments.
Heritage risk
RAAC has become a widely recognised acronym in the education sector, and for good reason. Its presence has forced schools, colleges and universities across the UK to close or partially vacate buildings while assessments and repairs are made. But at St. Catherine’s, the implications went beyond structural risk.
The affected buildings were not just historic. St. Catherine’s is one of the most celebrated examples of post-war modernism in the UK, carrying a Grade I listing. This meant any intervention would require full planning and listed building consent, a process that can take months or even years. While temporary measures were implemented to make the accommodation blocks safe and communal facilities relocated, the College needed a plan that would not only resolve its RAAC issue quickly but also maintain fidelity to Jacobsen’s original design.
Integrated planning and heritage
One of the defining strengths of the project was its approach to planning and heritage expertise. In many cases, these disciplines are handled separately, often leading to misalignment or delays.
However, with the scale of this intervention unprecedented - entire roofs across a complex of individually designated Grade I buildings needed replacing – and with students already evacuated, exceptional coordination and trust between parties were critical.
To achieve this, planning and conservation were integrated from the outset, allowing the team to address technical constraints, heritage concerns, and policy compliance holistically, rather than sequentially. This integration enabled the faster resolution of design and heritage conflicts, allowing the team to adapt more quickly as technical and policy challenges emerged.
A unified team
Likewise, in time-critical projects such as St. Catherine’s, a unified and aligned project team is a crucial factor. Again, early collaboration between planning and heritage experts, architects, engineers and college representatives was key, helping everyone understand their role and its impact on others.
The project team also established efficient working practices with statutory bodies, including Oxford City Council, Historic England, and the Twentieth Century Society, building on pre-existing relationships and trust.
Rather than relying on formal feedback loops and individual meetings, all parties involved met simultaneously and sequentially. We also captured and circulated feedback and key design decisions from meetings, rather than waiting for a written response after every session, which would have added significant delay. In similar high-stakes settings, this proactive approach can shorten the planning timeline considerably.
As you might expect, heritage projects can draw passionate responses. The Twentieth Century Society, for example, expressed understandable concern at the removal of original materials. While they accepted that the RAAC roofs needed to go, the knock-on impact for a significant amount of original glazing directly affixed to the RAAC and consequently incapable of being retained was a bitter pill to swallow.
Rather than resist or underplay those concerns, however, it’s vital to engage with them in staged, transparent dialogue. In the case of St. Catherine’s, we presented our options and decision pathway so everyone understood our reasoning, demonstrated the structural and material limitations, and clarified which decisions were unavoidable.
In fact, one of the most effective tools in our process was progressive evidence-sharing to inform key design decisions, which were made collaboratively with key stakeholders. Each step – from identifying risks, to proposing replacement materials, to showing structural impacts – was introduced gradually. This measured and staged engagement allowed stakeholders to absorb technical details in context, reducing resistance and building a shared understanding and collective buy-in to the design solution.
Clarity of scope
A tightly defined project scope also proved invaluable to achieving planning consent at pace. The brief was clear: remove unsafe material, preserve external appearance, and maintain the building’s original educational use.
The fact that the College’s intended use would not change worked in our favour and is something that other institutions facing an emergency planning requirement could also utilise to their advantage.
With the scope of works tightly defined, we were able to bypass complex viability arguments and instead focus on fabric preservation and risk mitigation. The goal of the St. Catherine’s project wasn’t a new use or a change of character, but ensuring safety and fidelity. This allowed stakeholders to feel more confident in supporting urgent intervention.
A phased approach
To expedite planning, a phased application approach was also implemented in conjunction with Oxford City Council, Historic England and Twentieth Century Society.
The main reason for subdividing the application into phases was to ensure that the footprint of each phase would fall within the threshold for a delegated application, rather than a major application, thereby ensuring expediency in terms of determination timescales. For settings managing heritage campuses, phased consent can be a helpful tactic, especially where funding or site logistics demand a staged approach.
The first phase included all the communal elements of the College buildings – the SCR, JCR, dining hall, Wolfson library and Bernard Sunley Building. This was the priority for the College; alongside reinstating all important student functions and a sense of normalcy, there were financial implications. Temporary accommodation, for example, in the form of marquees, was an additional expenditure for the College while the buildings remained out of use.
As the site is a Grade I listed heritage asset, it was important to show that the works would happen in a joined-up way. If only Phase 1 had gone ahead, it could have harmed the integrity of the overall site. To avoid this, the team agreed to submit the Phase 2 application for the accommodation blocks before the decision on Phase 1, ensuring a clear link and consistent approach across all buildings.
To expedite construction once consent was granted, it was also agreed at the pre-application stage which documents needed to be submitted upfront to avoid delay associated with discharging pre-commencement conditions. These included traffic and environmental management plans, a historic building record, and a tree protection strategy. Planning officers worked closely with the team to resolve queries and reduce the need for extra planning conditions.
Unexpected blockers
While well-scoped, the project still faced significant legislative and technical hurdles. One of the more surprising obstacles to the project was the Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) requirement. The legislation had recently come into force and applied here, despite the site being a formally designed and listed garden. There was no scope for a net gain within the site boundary, and arranging off-site credits would have introduced an unacceptable delay.
The only practical solution was to redefine the red line boundary to exclude areas of existing ecological value, to qualify for a ‘de minimis’ exemption. While an inelegant fix, it was a necessary one and highlights a broader issue for estate teams managing heritage sites that sometimes new policy tools don’t map easily onto legacy assets. Here, working with trusted consultants and building case-specific evidence is vital to finding compliant yet pragmatic solutions.
Other challenges included technical constraints around the roof structure. RAAC panel removal required minimal visual disruption; however, the proposed roof system needed to increase in depth to meet both structural and thermal performance standards. Raising the roof, even subtly, raised heritage concerns. The team addressed these issues by presenting side-by-side visual comparisons, involving key stakeholders in the options assessment process, along with engineering justifications and precedents.
Planning successes
Through a combination of measures, the planning process, from pre-application to decision, took just seven months, which is exceptional for heritage projects.
Another major success in the planning journey was securing a five-year time limit for Phase 2 of the works, rather than the standard three years. Critically, this will give the College time to raise substantial funds and phase the works sensibly.
To achieve this milestone, we prepared a supporting statement that framed the extended timeline not as a delay, but as a practical necessity for conservation by linking the risk of premature action – removing part of a historic roof without resources in place to complete the work – to potential harm. This made it a conservation issue, not just a financial one.
Lessons for campus estate leaders
For estates directors, bursars, and facilities leads navigating urgent works on heritage campuses, this project offers a model worth following. While the presence of RAAC made the case at St. Catherine’s exceptional, the principles that underpinned its success apply more broadly, whether it’s responding to structural degradation, fire or outdated materials.
One of the most important lessons is the value of clarity. A tightly defined brief, focused on student safety, continuity of use, and minimal visual change, helped align all parties and accelerate decision-making.
Assembling the right team early also proved vital. A collaborative project group, with close coordination between planning, heritage, design and engineering specialists, helped avoid delays and manage complexity. Critically, this team engaged with statutory bodies at an early stage, not just through formal channels but via informal, iterative conversations. This approach built trust, created space for questions, and ensured stakeholders felt part of the journey rather than presented with a pre-decided solution.
Likewise, adopting a phased approach to planning and decision-making helped achieve a successful outcome in unprecedented timing.
With growing pressure on an ageing educational estate infrastructure, similar emergencies are increasingly likely. But as St. Catherine’s experience shows, urgent heritage interventions can be delivered at pace and without compromise.