TVS helps to orchestrate a new community hub for the Hallé

The award-winning Hallé Symphony Orchestra has long been associated with Manchester’s famous Bridgewater Hall, but it now has a new home for its community work in the city. Creation of the Hallé St Peter’s Oglesby Centre involved the completion of a £6.6 million three-storey extension to a former church dating back to 1859.

To ensure that the resulting extension would meet the orchestra’s exacting acoustic requirements, designers of the scheme, Architects Stephenson Studio, called in TVS Group. Both companies had already worked successfully together on a similar project at the city’s Chetham’s School of Music, the largest school of its kind in the UK.

The extension, in the city’s once industrial Ancoats area, is now home for the Hallé’s rehearsals and recordings, its choirs and Youth Orchestra, as well as a space for education workshops and small performances. It even has a café and bar open to the public.

TVS Acoustics was tasked with designing and installing specialist acoustic flooring for the extension together with steelwork isolation pads which sit within the floors to take various column loads. “Few projects demonstrate the need for both perfect acoustics and room to room noise suppression better than Hallé St Peter’s,” explained Christopher Taylor, Projects Director at TVS. “Not only did the acoustic flooring in the rehearsal rooms need to meet demanding standards, the perimeter columns, sitting on pads within the floor, had to comply with specific loading and performance requirements.”

TVS chose its RESi Concrete Floating Floor system for the project. As well as excellent acoustic benefits it offers great strength while the large dead load that the floating slab provides ensures minimal movement under the addition of any live loading. The system also allows for ‘pour in place’ construction, where the acoustics formwork is built and then the fibre-reinforced concrete poured in at the final design height with no requirement for any additional levelling or jacking up.

The specialist TVS RESi Concrete Floating Floor was installed over three different rehearsal areas. TVS also decoupled all the rooms from each other to prevent noise transfer between them. Additional isolators were installed around the perimeters of each room to accommodate the construction of walls which would sit on top of the floating floor.

TVS Acoustics, Tel: 01706 260 220, sales@tvs-acoustics.com

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