Newcastle University’s £4.6m Farrell Centre – named in honour of leading architect and former student Terry Farrell – is set to open to the public for the first time on Saturday.

The centre, which is housed in a four-storey former Victorian commercial building that has been converted by SPACE Architects and Elliott Architects, will host exhibitions, research areas, and three “urban rooms” of the kind Farrell said all UK towns and cities should have.

The urban room call came in Farrell’s 2014 review of architecture and planning, commissioned by culture miniser at the time Ed Vaizey. Farrell said every town or city without its own dedicated architecture and built-environment centre should have somewhere for the public to “look at the past, present and future” of the place where they live.

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