Full marks for Cambridge students

The final results are in! Cambridge's largest Passivhaus student development, Hinsley Lane, has achieved certification.

Commissioned by St John's College, Cambridge and designed by Architects Allies and Morrison, the project harks back to the traditional college setting, providing 39 new red brick terraced townhouses set within shared gardens. Certified by PHT Patron Max Fordham, the development houses students from St John’s, Lucy Cavendish and Clare Hall, which can also lease these rooms to Senior Members of the College, creating an unusual mixed academic community.

Key stats:

Construction: Cross laminated timber (CLT)
Area: 8600sqm
Number of units: 39, housing up to 245 study bedrooms in total
Estimated build contract: £32 million
Completion date: May 2025
Certified: Passivhaus Standard

Hinsley Lane offers a thoughtful alternative to the current high rise UK student housing template. The development demonstrates the important connection between the built environment and green space, with orientation and layout playing a central role in its environmental strategy.

Hinsley Lane | Image credit: Allies and Morrison

Terraces are arranged on a north/south axis, ensuring that every unit benefits from a south-facing rear elevation to maximise daylight and passive solar gain. Optimised for environmental performance, the buildings orientation, shading, window sizing and ventilation all work hard to balance summer comfort with winter efficiency. Linear communal gardens run between the terraces, fostering both biodiversity and social space and incorporating mature trees from the site’s previous life as an agricultural estate for St John’s.

The houses are all carefully designed to combine comfort, sustainability and community with three key typologies:

a seven-bedroom house with an attic room on the third floor
an accessible six-bedroom end-of-terrace over three storeys
a four-bedroom house also over three storeys

Construction

The form of construction for the townhouses incorporates piled foundations and thermally broken insitu reinforced concrete slabs, CLT super-structures with CLT window frames and pitched roofs with dormer window insertions, high performance windows, and doors, facing brickwork cavity walls, hung clay tiled facades and roof coverings.

With a low carbon CLT structure the building fabric is highly efficient, achieving airtightness levels as low as 0.08ACH - far below Passivhaus requirements. These high-performance buildings minimise heat loss and lower operational carbon, representing a significant long-term benefit for St John's College, neighbouring colleges and the students living at Hinsley Lane.

With a £6.3 million services value, heating and hot water are provided by air-source heat-pumps. Photovoltaic panels are located on selected south facing roof slopes with diverters to divert electricity generated to the heat-pumps. Ventilation and heat recovery (MVHR) is provided with a series of chimneys serving as sources of intake and extract.

We are delighted to offer beautiful, well-equipped and comfortable homes that support academic life and build a close-knit graduate community. These schemes also reflect the changing needs of modern postgraduate life by providing additional high-quality accommodation for couples and families. The projects all use efficient electric heating and ultra-low-energy design, marking a significant step in the decarbonisation of the College’s estate

Alison Cox, Domestic Bursar and Fellow of St John's

Challenges & lessons learned

Balancing ambition and budget: The Client’s brief required high quality and sustainable buildings that are flexible and durable in use, efficient in terms of space and energy and cost-efficient to run and maintain. Interestingly, Passivhaus certification was not part of original brief but agreed upon between the Client and architect during design development. This decision was taken after a robust cost comparison demonstrated that any additional outlay could be offset by increasing capacity through accommodating an eaves room at second storey.
Heritage context: Set within the Cambridge conservation area, the overall design had to respond to the protected red brick, arts and crafts aesthetic.
Educating users post occupancy: To ensure the energy saving benefits of the project were realised, new occupants of the houses were provided with a property handbook, which included a detailed quick start user guide to explaining the Passivhaus design strategy of the homes. Mindful of how occupants will get the best from the building, and how they will acquire the knowledge to achieve this, the guidance offers information on design strategy, M&E components and some handy do's and don'ts.

Key team

Client: St John’s College, Cambridge
Architect: Allies and Morrison
Passivhaus Designer/ Consultant: Max Fordham and Allies and Morrison
Contractor: Cocksedge
Structural engineer: Smith and Wallwork Engineers
M&E engineer: Calfordseaden

Making connections

Complementing its Passivhaus credentials, the project’s greatest strength lies in its commitment to sociability and wellbeing. Designed for residents at a formative and often high-pressure stage of life, the scheme makes a compelling case for shared living that actively supports mental health. The housing is organised into groups that are small enough to foster meaningful relationships, yet large enough to encourage diversity and inclusion.

Hinsley Lane | Image credit: Allies and Morrison

Striking a thoughtful balance between connection and independence, the scheme offers a model that could be successfully adapted to other sectors, including social housing and care environments. It is a project that exemplifies a long-term, future-focused approach to housing investment. As universities, local authorities and care providers respond to the challenges of net zero, resident wellbeing and sensitive urban integration, Hinsley Lane stands out as a compelling demonstration of how Passivhaus architecture can meet, and exceed, these demands.