LJMU’s flagship development at Copperas Hill
LJMU’s £65m flagship development at Copperas Hill is home to their new Student Life Building and Sports Building. This three and a half acre site in Liverpool’s Knowledge Quarter is home to many key student services and superb facilities.
This impressive building is a new gateway for Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) and a focal point for the further regeneration of Copperas Hill.
The linked Student Life Building and Sports Building are part of the university’s Copperas Hill campus and include learning, teaching, sports and student services facilities.
The five-storey 9,500m2 Student Life Building is a hub for students and designed as a new civic ‘front door’ for LJMU. It is situated in the city centre and at the entrance to the University Quarter from the Liverpool Lime Street Station approach. The building relocates all administration, student advice and wellbeing, and careers services into a single location, and provides a visible new home for the student union, JMSU.
The two-storey 4,000m2 Sports Building provides indoor competition sports facilities designed to Sport England standards, including an eight-court badminton hall and two multipurpose halls. The interior for the cardio and weights gyms has an industrial look and feel, using black, white and grey, with rubber sports floor, acoustic ceiling panels and mirrored walls for durability and function.
The exteriors of both buildings are characterised by an external sheltered walkway, a colonnade that curves along the full length of the 120m-long site, linking the buildings together and forming the frontage, designed to create a civic route through a site.
Chevrons and triangular patterns are repeated across the colonnade and façades, inspired by Denys Lasdun’s iconic Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral and the city’s former Lewis’s department store.
This week marks the official completion of the project by Architect Sheppard Robson. Alex Solk, partner at Sheppard Robson, said:
Copperas Hill is a significant site that regenerates a previously inaccessible part of Liverpool city centre. The new buildings and public realm form a civic gateway to the university with the buildings and spaces reinforcing LJMU’s role as an anchor institution in the city.
Mark Askem, director of estates at LJMU, added:
Our flagship development at Copperas Hill opened in 2021 and is already proving to be a significant and popular addition to our estate.
LJMU and our students’ union, JMSU, worked closely with Sheppard Robson on the design of the buildings and the public realm to ensure it would help us to deliver on our primary objective of providing an outstanding student experience.
