Home to our Animal Studies courses, our students gain hands-on experience with a wide variety of animals in our Animal Management Centre. 

This £1.7m innovative and highly energy efficient building has climate control and lighting systems which allow students to observe animals in as natural an environment as possible.

Individual climate controlled rooms

Each room has individual controls for heating and fresh air handling allowing each room to be its own climate. There’s also timed lighting controls to ensure ’day lengths’ are controlled in the winter months. 

Nocturnal room

The nocturnal room has standard white lights and a separate blue light. The blue light is adjustable to very low levels, mimicking the light effect of a moonlit night. 

This allows us to work with the animals on husbandry tasks in the morning and then switch to nighttime conditions in the afternoon. This enables students to observe nocturnal behaviour during the teaching day. 

The central corridor has north lights and the south elevation has no windows, limiting the solar gain in the summer.

A carbon positive building

The Animal Management Centre is carbon positive. It will generate more electricity from 45kw of PV panels than it consumes and is heated by air source heat pumps. The hot water is generated from 5kw of solar collectors plus electric (PV) top up so burns no fossil fuel on site.

All the rainwater from the roof is sent to two large holding tanks for use in the horticultural department replacing borehole water for plant irrigation.