Le Havre Food Hub

University of Bath, Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering

Idea projektu

Le Havre’s old town presents a unique context—its complex street grains recall the cities pre-war urbanism, yet the area now suffers from a degree of neglect and a lack of meaningful community infrastructure. Infill sites and vacant lots offer opportunities to introduce pocket parks and public amenities that can reweave the social and spatial fabric of the district.

Concurrently, there is growing public demand for more transparent, direct-to-consumer food systems. However, small-scale farmers often bear the financial burden of meeting this demand, highlighting the need for shared infrastructure that supports sustainable, local food economies.

This project proposes a food hub and cider brewery that responds to both urban and agricultural challenges. By reconnecting with Normandy’s rich food and cider-making heritage, the proposal fosters local identity, supports independent producers, and activates underused urban space through a combination of production, education, and community gathering.

Popis projektu

The Le Havre food hub aggregates produce from the surrounding farmland for sale within its market hall. It completes the centre of a city block - forming a public landscape and streetscape. It’s stone walls and floating roofs define ‘programmatic corridors’ that guide activity and the movement of people and goods.

Through the central street runs a loop of cargo bikes, picking up produce and making local deliveries all over the city, as well as distributing to a wider network of train and river barge shipments to transport the goods to cities upriver. Simultaneously, smaller streets and corridors branch off the main street, and become both external and internal programmed space. This establishes a grid system - a series of programmatic corridors that span the width and depth of the site.

Technické informace

The project is a mixed-use food hub and cider brewery located in the Le Havre old town. It integrates a public-facing programme—including a teaching kitchen, food hall, dining spaces, and event courtyard—with production functions such as apple processing, fermentation, storage, and bottling. The overall site area is approx.5400m² with a GIA of approx.1850m².

The project employs a low-carbon, regionally rooted material palette. The primary structure uses a double skin load bearing limestone, locally quarried from Vassens in Northern France. Which is used also for courtyard paving and selected finishes, adding material continuity with regional architecture.

The roof structure is a prefabricated timber cassette system, comprised of Douglas fir, sourced from sustainably managed forests in the Massif Central (France) and South West Germany—Europe’s leading producers of the species. Longitudinal steel members are reclaimed from deconstructed industrial buildings in Le Havre, reinforcing the project’s circular economy approach. The roof is clad in standing seam zinc from VMZINC, produced in Bray-et-Lû, tying the building together with its residential surroundings.