Set against the Thames Estuary landscape, the RSPB’s visitor centre at its Rainham Marshes reserve is undeniably striking, to the point where it initially divided opinion among public and conservationists regarding both its cost and its design.
95 : Rainham RSPB visitor centre
2006
Set against the Thames Estuary landscape, the RSPB’s visitor centre at its Rainham Marshes reserve is undeniably striking, to the point where it initially divided opinion among public and conservationists regarding both its cost and its design.
There have always been nature reserves of a sort since humans gathered into tribes or nations, whether they were designated hunting or fishing territories for a king or priest, or taboo areas in which such practices were expressly forbidden.
The first state-sanctioned reserve is generally taken to be the Drachenfels in northern Germany, a mountain which was protected from quarrying, its previous use, by the Prussian government in 1836. Yellowstone National Park in the USA was the first reserve as we would understand it, being preserved from human settlement and exploitation in 1872, but in Russia Il’menskii, a zapovednik (‘sacred area’, to be kept forever wild), was the first site to be protected primarily for the study of nature in 1919.
The securing and promotion of Britain’s 2,000 or more nature reserves demanded facilities for visitors. Local authorities, wildlife trusts (originally by created by Lord Rothschild in 1912), the RSPB and other bodies have been intermittently installing visitor centres on their sites since the beginning of the 20th century, though some have been very basic indeed and other locations still have no facilities, even after decades of use. The importance of having amenities for the public became more apparent in the 1960s and 1970s, when the RSPB stepped up its land acquisition programme after predicting the squeeze on bird-rich habitats for decades. A wave of visitor centre construction took place from that period onwards.
The new era of state-of-the-art, environmentally friendly visitor centres is best typified by the somewhat futuristic building at Rainham Marshes RSPB reserve, where industrialised east London peters out into Essex’s Thames corridor. Long recognised as a birding hot-spot, the reserve was acquired by the RSPB in 2000 from the Ministry of Defence, which had used it principally as a test firing range, and it was officially opened to the public six years later.
The £2.3 million visitor centre at Rainham is a bold design, its twin-funnelled, multi-coloured façade cloaking a structure which sits on 19 metre-deep pilings in the ground to prevent the River Thames from undermining the building. It boasts green power generation and conservation from photovoltaic cells, passive solar heating, a small wind turbine, a ground heat source pump, sheeps’ wool insulation, rainwater harvesting and low energy lighting. The building won six awards for its sustainable design, including a Regeneration and Renewal Award and a Royal Institute of British Architects National Award.
Since then, other impressive facilities have opened at reserves such as the RSPB’s Titchwell, Saltholme and Minsmere sites, and the Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s Cley Marshes reserve. The balance between providing ease of access and comfort for the public and the cost of such installations has been precarious, but over time these landmark projects undeniably become a focal point for local communities and help establish such sites on the wider map.