The Maes y Capel development, commissioned by Wrexham County Borough Council and delivered by Read Construction under the North Wales Construction Partnership (NWCP), represents a significant step forward in providing modern, accessible, and supportive housing for older residents. The £3.6 million scheme forms part of the Council’s long-term strategy to reimagine its residential estate with high-quality, low-maintenance homes tailored to the evolving needs of individuals aged 55 and over.

Comprising 22 purpose-built apartments, the scheme provides a mix of one- and two-bedroom units, each averaging 57m². Designed to promote independence while offering embedded support services, each apartment features spacious open-plan kitchen, dining, and living areas, with access to shared communal lounges that foster social interaction and community building. The development also includes dedicated staff and administration facilities to ensure residents receive responsive and professional assistance when needed.

Maes y Capel is the fourth consecutive project awarded to Read Construction as part of Wrexham Council’s estate modernisation programme. This continuity has enabled the integration of best practices and lessons learned from earlier NWCP collaborations—resulting in enhanced build quality, efficient project delivery, and cost-effective outcomes. A consistent supply chain, developed across prior schemes, has contributed to the achievement of high specification finishes and streamlined workflows, ensuring delivery on time, within budget, and to exacting standards of safety and sustainability.

Delivered by Read Construction under the North Wales Construction Partnership (NWCP), the Farming Futures Sustainability Hub at Coleg Cambria’s Llysfasi campus represents a new benchmark in sustainable education infrastructure. Developed following the success of the campus’s Community Hub, this cutting-edge facility demonstrates how purposeful investment and collaborative design can unlock meaningful environmental and social outcomes.

As a flagship Net Zero development, the Hub has been designed and constructed to achieve operational carbon neutrality. This includes incorporating high-performance building fabric, renewable energy sources, passive design strategies, and low-carbon technologies. Features such as advanced insulation, air source heat pumps, energy-efficient lighting, and solar PV arrays contribute to a minimal energy footprint and long-term sustainability. Lifecycle carbon assessments also informed material choices and construction methods, ensuring that both embodied and operational carbon impacts were addressed from concept to completion.

The facility provides essential infrastructure for learners and agricultural professionals, including purpose-built soil laboratories, a demonstration theatre, dynamic learning environments, and a café. It also serves as a collaborative platform for industry leaders across engineering, forestry, and countryside management to explore and share innovations in sustainable land practices and technology.

The Farming Futures Sustainability Hub is not only a testament to climate-conscious design but also an engine for community engagement, economic growth, and skills development

Joint funded by the Welsh Government and Wrexham County Borough Council, this award winning scheme saw the extensions and alterations to provide a 21st Century learning environment.
The client brief for this D&B project was to deliver a modern, flexible teaching space that is simple in form with best whole life value a core expectation. Read worked collaboratively with the design, client and end user teams to ensure effective communication and minimal disruption.
The scheme included four separate workfaces within the school campus and a new entrance road, car park with associated external works. The project was delivered within the live school campus with minimal disruption and ZERO harm to pupils, staff or visitors.
The new build teaching block comprised structural steel frame on pad foundations with external rainscreen cladding.
The scheme was a finalist in the LABC Building Excellence Awards, and received a High Commendation for the Best Public Building category. Borras Park CP School project won the award for the ‘Best Educational Development’.

Joint funded by the Welsh Government and Coleg Cambria, the new build Community Hub project provides a central hub that can facilitate a variety of services in a single setting. The two-storey facility includes IT and multimedia suites, workshops, classrooms, breakout spaces, meeting rooms and offices which will deliver bilingual, family and community-focused services.
Delivered as a BIM Level 2 compliant project, this scheme benefited from digital optioneering and buildability reviews within the modelled data environment.
With clash management at the heart of this process, we modelled design information and used software intelligently to interrogate the design. This facilitated the team in working collaboratively to identify issues long before they reached site, adding certainty to the cost and programme. All elements with a service or maintenance requirement had site information captured and fed back into the Revit model to produce an Asset Information Model with meaningful operational and maintenance data embedded within it.

A 2-stage, £5.3m Design and Build Project for the refurbishment and extension of an existing 4-storey 1960’s office block. The completed project provides modern facilities for various local authority and wellbeing services within a town centre, accessible setting – promoting town centre rejuvenation and investment.

The Crown Building project stands out from the crowd in Wrexham Council’s dedication to their Net Zero ambition – transforming an outdated and inefficient 1960’s facility into a modern office by focusing on a fabric first refurbishment that reduces energy demand & waste while maximising the supply of renewable energy.

Crown Buildings focusses on environmental sustainability delivering major reductions in carbon emissions, and extension of an existing built assets lifespan by 50+ years – saving embodied carbon, future raw material extraction and opex.

The project was a finalist in the Net Zero Constructing Excellence in Wales award and is the all Wales LABC winner in the Best Public / Community Building category.

Joint funded by the Welsh Government and Coleg Cambria, the new build Community Hub project provides a central hub that can facilitate a variety of services in a single setting. The two-storey facility includes IT and multimedia suites, workshops, classrooms, breakout spaces, meeting rooms and offices which will deliver bilingual, family and community-focused services.

Delivered as a BIM Level 2 compliant project, this scheme benefited from digital optioneering and buildability reviews within the modelled data environment.

This construct only project extended the teaching provision at Ysgol Bro Alun in response to increased demand for Welsh medium education in the local area. Designed and constructed by local organisations, the project matched the existing teaching ‘wing’ in its steel frame construction with standing seam roof and external architectural wall panels.

Delivered in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, there were multiple challenges to overcome to ensure maximum benefits to the local community were achieved.

Despite these challenges, Read worked collaboratively with the client and local support agencies to deliver targeted and location relevant, long-term benefit.

This design and build project included the extension of the existing school facility to provide additional learning space, a new nursery facility and increased classroom capacity to facilitate an increase in pupils from 210 to 315.

The Challenge

Through years of working similar projects, Stuart McKenzie and Stuart Jones began work as sole craftsman. One of the toughest and crucial elements of any successful construction company throughout the UK is to commandeer future work.

The Response

Following receiving the advert for the project Meet the Buyer event arranged by Read Construction, the two approached Read as a partnership during the initial stages of the Llandudno Junction Primary School Project. The Meet the Buyer event allowed them to meet with the Read team and discuss upcoming opportunities on the project.

Introduction

As part of the 21st Century Schools Framework, Read Construction were appointed in September 2015 as the Main Contractor on the Llandudno Junction Area New School development project.

The scheme involves the construction of a new Primary School with the capacity of 432 pupils and 60 Nursery places.

Throughout the contract, Read are committed to investing in the local community to provide added value to project deliveries and Clients’ investments through a Community Benefits Programme. Read’s Community Benefits Plan includes providing talks for School children from the Health and Safety Mascot, Ivor Goodsite, providing local employment opportunities and supporting regeneration and community engagement in the local area.

Community Engagement

Why do we do this?

Read Construction believe it is important to benefit both the Client by delivering a quality project, but also the local community and areas surrounding the project. This enables the local community to actively engage with the project throughout the building work and be a part of the process. Read’s Community Benefits Plan addresses ‘Sustainable Procurement’ Environmentally, Socially and Economically. Read will deliver value for money on in terms of generating benefits to society and the economy, whilst minimising damage to the environment.

How do we do it?

Some examples of the types of Community Benefit activities that Read carry out:

• Talks to local School children about Health & Safety from Ivor Goodsite
• Community Social Media pages to update the community on progress and notices
• Project specific Community Benefit plans
• Work experience opportunities in a number of trades
• Construction site tours
• Local employment opportunities

STEM Support

In the interest of inspiring young people in the local area, two of the site team members, Jess and Ian, recently attended a Codi STEM event. The event, organised by Coleg Llandrillo-Menai, was aimed at encouraging students from local schools to consider careers in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).

The Read team spoke to the students about the varying roles in the construction industry and the different routes available to someone wishing to pursue a career in construction. Students were able to look at plans for the Llandudno Junction School project, the recently completed Chester Zoo Islands project and speak to the team about upcoming plans and opportunities.

Aled Hughes, Coleg Llandrillo-Menai commented:

“I want to thank Read Construction for supporting the Codi STEM event. The event itself was hugely successful and it couldn’t be done without support from employers such as yourselves.”

Read will continue to support careers events, in the hope of inspiring more young people to pursue construction careers.

Upcoming community activities

Over the duration of the project Read will continue to work in partnership with the local community, schools and Conwy County Borough Council to deliver community benefits and maximise the added value of the project.

Read are currently working in collaboration with the Conwy Voluntary Services Council to scope out the plans for a potential community garden project. The project will involve local businesses and members of the community.

Read have partnered with CITB to develop a programme of educational visits and work placements once the project is in the construction phase. Through partnering with the CITB, Read will shortly be attending a number of local secondary school and colleges to provide careers talks and give an insight into the world of Construction.

Waste diverted from landfill

Read Construction are proud signatories of the “Halving Waste to Landfill” WRAP initiative. In order to demonstrate our progress towards this commitment, Read measure, collect and collate waste data on a monthly basis (waste mass and composition feedback from specialist waste management contractor).

The data is converted into KPIs (key performance indicators) which are monitored and reported back to the site delivery teams to ensure that the benchmark is continuously met and improved.

Having developed lean waste management procedures the company can comply to BREEAM Waste credit requirements with confidence, deliver the company’s Social Responsibilities, and offer savings to Clients.

The Challenge

Following on from our Community Benefit  Strategic Interest Group, great links have been formed with the Tier 1 contractors who are running projects as part of the framework, and JCP being integral in supporting these opportunities with customers for work experience and job starts

In some areas where they are not currently working on framework schemes, the Contractors have looked at some of their other non-framework projects to offer work experience and potential job opportunities.

The Response

Working with Wynne Construction: One such project has been the construction of the new lifeboat station in Llandudno. Due to the support of Alison from Wynne Construction, a young unemployed man from Conwy was given a work experience opportunity to work on the site with one of the sub-contractors.

Working with Read Construction: The team at Read construction have been busy on their school build in Llandudno Junction, and employed a local sub-contractor partnership to complete some of the joinery work

Due to amount of work that was made available to them for both framework and subsequently non framework jobs, they needed to think bigger and take on some more labouring staff

Due to the relationship they were aware of with JCP and Read through the framework, one of the partners spoke to an employer and partnership advisor from Llandudno job centre, who just happened to be an N W Construction Forum representative.