Elephant & Castle housing delay "not acceptable" admits regeneration boss

Tuesday 11 November 2008
London SE1 website team

Delays to the building of new social housing intended for tenants of the Heygate Estate are "clearly not acceptable for residents", regeneration supremo Cllr Paul Noblet told a town hall committee last week.

Southwark Council's cross-party overview and scrutiny committee held a meeting last week to investigate progress on the £1.3 billion Elephant & Castle regeneration programme.

Lend Lease deal
Asked for an update on the planned deal with developers Lend Lease, Cllr Paul Noblet (executive member for regeneration) reiterated that "working together with Transport for London is probably the most tortuous aspect of the deal".

The committee also asked Cllr Noblet whether he remained confident in Lend Lease's commitment to the Elephant in the light of their well-publicised funding difficulties at the Olympic Village.

"I don't have any questions over their commitment and ability to raise the finance for this project," he replied.

The committee heard that work is currently under way on a "revised masterplan" for the Elephant, but project director Jon Abbott was at pains to insist that this is "not a rip it up and start again exercise".

Cllr Noblet confirmed that all parties are "working very much towards December" for the signing of the final agreement with Lend Lease, but this timetable is dependent on agreeing costings for work to the Northern Line tube station with Transport for London.

"I don't think that the scheme should pay for the backlog in investment in transport assets at the Elephant & Castle," said Jon Abbott.
Southern roundabout and subway removal
The committee heard that Transport for London had concluded that Southwark's preferred redesign of the Elephant & Castle/Newington Butts/Walworth Road intersection as a T-junction with surface-level pedestrian crossings – planned for more than two years – would have an unacceptable impact on traffic flows.

A revised proposal from Transport for London – likely to be in the form of a signalled roundabout – is now being worked on.

This was confirmed last week by TfL commissioner Peter Hendy, who wrote: "The southern roundabout at Elephant and Castle is an important node on the Inner Ring Road. The scheme for this junction was re-examined to ensure that all had been done to smooth traffic flow, while retaining benefits for cyclists and pedestrians and in terms of the urban realm.

"As a consequence, TfL has developed a more balanced solution to meet the requirement, which is now being worked into a detailed design for discussion with Southwark Council and key stakeholders."
Credit crunch
The committee discussed the impact of the economic downturn on the regeneration plans for the Elephant.

Cllr David Hubber noted with concern the recent cut in the level of affordable housing at the 360 London development on the site of the former London Park Hotel and asked whether other developers would be likely to seek similar concessions.

Cllr Veronica Ward asked about the lack of progress on the Oakmayne Plaza site on New Kent Road. "Clearly they are having trouble raising the finance for the scheme; hence the revised planning application," replied Jon Abbott.
Heygate Estate and 'early housing' sites

Heygate tenant Helen O'Brien and former tenant Jerry Flynn made representations to the committee asking for a full investigation of the council's failure to built the so-called 'early housing sites' – several of them in SE1 – intended to provide new homes for existing Heygate tenants.

The council selected housing associations in 2005 but the first planning applications are only now being submitted.

"If they were built we wouldn't be in the mess we are now," said Mrs O'Brien.

Mr Flynn added: "You can't blame it on the credit crunch because there wasn't a credit crunch three years ago."

The council now says that it wants to clear the remaining tenants from the estate for "community safety reasons" and commence demolition of some blocks next year.

The reality is that many Heygate tenants have already been rehoused within the council's existing housing stock and a relatively small percentage have indicated that they intend to exercise their 'right to return' to the Elephant area so the original estimate of new homes required is now obsolete.

Cllr Noblet confirmed that he had stopped calling the development sites "early housing sites" in view of the late running of the scheme.

Five sites – including New Kent Road, St George's Road and Library Street in SE1 – are now in the planning system.

Cllr Noblet attributed the delays to "unfortunate circumstances".

It's clearly not acceptable for residents

"It's clearly not acceptable for residents, and I'm sorry that that's where we are," he told the committee, adding that the current five sites would serve as "templates" for a future conveyor belt of housing developments.

"It's the huge regret of myself and the administration that we didn't get the conveyor belt going by July 2007," he said.

The question of the delayed Elephant housing sites was also raised at last week's Council Assembly meeting. "This administration should hang their heads in shame," said Labour's Cllr Paul Bates.

Even Lib Dem loyalist James Gurling, chair of the borough's planning committee, has described the delays to the new housing as a "travesty".

The Heygate is not fit for human habitation

Council leader Nick Stanton defended the council's policy to move remaining residents from the Heygate Estate: "The Heygate is not fit for human habitation," he told councillors.

In heated exchanges in the council chamber, Labour councillor and parliamentary candidate Kirsty McNeill accused the ruling Lib Dem/Tory administration of a "failure of empathy, justice and common sense" in its dealings with Heygate tenants.

Housing boss Cllr Kim Humphreys conceded that the process had been "bumpy" but insisted that "it is not safe to allow people to live there".
Small businesses at the Elephant and the shopping centre
Jon Abbott updated the scrutiny committee on measures being taken to support small businesses at the Elephant & Castle, with whom he admitted that the council has had an "uneasy relationship".

He said that the recent confirmation that the shopping centre will remain standing until 2012 had provided a degree of certainty that made it easier for businesses to plan and invest.

A Towntalk website has been set up to promote businesses at the Elephant and the council is in discussion with shopping centre landlords St Modwen about investment in new signage and proposals to repaint the building.

Heygate Estate - Image set

Heygate estate

The London County Council initiated a major development of the Elephant and Castle Area from the late 1950s.

The last stage in this process was Heygate Estate of 1970 to 1974.

Though big by most standards (it provided 1194 homes), it is overshadowed by the much larger Aylesbury Estate a little to the south.

Era of Parker Boris dawns as mayor sets minimum space standards for London housing

20 November, 2008

By Vikki Miller

Mayor Boris Johnson will introduce minimum space standards for new homes in his upcoming London Plan.

The announcement of the move away from what Johnson called the present glut of “hobbit homes” came as he unveiled a £5 billion draft housing strategy this morning to boost the capital’s failing housing market in the next three years.

Johnson said: “I think it is a disgrace that the average size of a newly built home in this country is 76sq m compared to 206sq m in Australia… We are not hobbits, and we need to stop building homes for hobbits. We need a legacy of which our generation will be proud.”

He added: “Of course there will be [a] push back from developers, but you have to look to the interests of the people. We are going to be, in the new London Plan, insisting on a new Parker Morris standard.”

The Parker Morris standards, drawn up in the 1960s, were a set of minimum space standards for public housing.

However, not all architects will welcome the news.

HTA Architects’ managing director Ben Derbyshire said on BD’s website last week: “The more complex and demanding [space] standards are, the less likely they are to have significant benefits…

“I'm concerned by reports that Boris Johnson is falling for the misconception that physical standards will raise housing quality overall.”

The mayor’s strategy also included plans for a London housing design guide to ensure higher environmental standards for new homes developed with public funding, as well as better safety, security and liveability.

Private developers will be “encouraged” to adopt the standards in the guide.

“It is important we do not compromise on the quality and the attractiveness of what we build,” the mayor said. “I don’t want the stuff that we build to be torn down in 20 or 30 years’ time, I want it to stand.”

Johnson reiterated his election pledge to scrap London’s 50% affordable homes targets, which he said got “in the way of good development”.

He did, however, confirm plans to build 50,000 affordable homes by 2011, which he said would be achieved by agreeing separate targets with each London borough.

Under the new plan, Johnson also pledged to:

* prioritise public funding for new housing that embraces Secured by Design standards and has a high level of environmental benefit;
* bring forward public and private sector land for new homes;
* buy up unsold market homes for use as affordable housing; and
* build more family homes

Photos of walk into Elephant & Castle

The mile-high tower also illustrates the ecological advantages of living tall, as building up instead of out holds more people in a smaller footprint. This in turn reduces ecological impacts and the time needed to transport them. Close-knit living is also a way to rebuild disconnected communities, and to make life safer through the ‘natural surveillance’ created by populating areas 24/7.

Drawn up by Popularchitecture and intended for Tower Hamlets in East London, the giant skyscraper would be three times larger than anything ever built in the capital, creating 12 new ‘villages’ in the sky. However, despite the project’s ‘almost unbelievable proportions’, practice founder Tom Teatum does not feel the scheme is that crazy, insisting there are developers who are interested, ‘in particular because of minimal land value in relation to accommodation… occupying a scale far beyond anything that currently exists in London, the tower would allow the city’s population to expand without significant impact to the architectural fabric on the ground.’

At the center of the structure would be a ‘vast internal void’ lit by circular openings every 20 storys. Each of these ‘holes’ would be used as either public squares or for specialist activities such as ice skating, botanic gardens or swimming pools. Nice idea and nice visuals but it looks like it’ll be firmly rooted in our imaginations for the time being.

Capital Spaces: Transforming London

"What could London look like in 2012, the year of the Olympic Games? Could it be a city in which old and new buildings and public spaces, the historic and the contemporary, combine to create a world-class stage for the Olympics and a better place for its citizens?

English Heritage and the Royal Institute of British Architects have joined forces to publish a call to action to ensure London is fit for the spotlight of world attention. Capital Spaces: Transforming London was launched at Wellington Arch 8 February 2005, a week before the arrival of the International Olympic Committee in London."

St George's circus is mentioned (along with the Elephant & Castle plans) on page 19 (project 24). .

"Nearby, St George's Circus is to be restored. This once proud piece of Georgian town planning, where terraced houses raidate from a spacious circus, marks the meeting point of five routes. London South Bank University which owns most of the land in the area has a crucial role to play in the rejuvenation plans."

You can download a copy of Capital Spaces on the EH website at
http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/default.asp?WCI=NewsItem&WCE=540

There is a sketch birds eye view showing a number of planned new buildings around the Circus and along London Road. The Duke of Clarence and the terrace seem to be kept, but with a taller building occupying the block immediately behind them.

The plans also appear to include demolishing the 1960s office block on the north east corner (east side of Blackfriars Road) and building a twin for the student housing that went up a few years ago on the north west corner on the former eye hospital site.

They also appear to include a tall building (10 storeys +???) on the junction of London Road opposite St George's RC Cathedral, on the currently empty airspace above the Bakerloo line sidings.
This seems a bizarre proposal for EH to endorse, as surely it would dominate theCathedral. (Having said this, the current south facade is underwhelming - is the Roman Catholic Church ever going to find/encourage an ultra-conservative benefactor to pay for completing the tower to Pugin's design rather than some more obviously deserving charitable purpose)

(The sketch is credited to and copyright "Urban Practioners" - a firm of regeneration consultants who have apparently been appointed by English Heritage- see this earlier press release
http://www.towncentres.ltd.uk/pages/mediacentre/press/18-03-04a.htm )

Possible Site???

Lambeth: London Fire Brigade Headquarters, Albert Embankment, SE1

In 2007 the London Fire Brigade sold this Headquarters building to housing developers with a view to moving the HQ to a site in Union Street SE1, close to their Training Centre, in 2008. This eight storey building was purpose built for the London Fire Brigade between 1934 and 1937, at a cost of about £390,000 including the purchase of the land, and was officially opened on 21 July 1937 by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. It has seven turn-outs onto Albert Embankment, protected by the traffic lights.

Sustainable Urban Communities

Imagine what a safe, livable, healthy community might look like. Around the country citizens are coming together to create a vision of what their community might be and to develop steps toward making these visions come true. Alternatively called "healthy," livable" or sustainable communities, these efforts are integrative, inclusive and participatory. In many communities -- large and small, rural and urban -- issues are being addressed in an interconnected manner. They are demonstrating how innovative strategies can produce communities that are more environmentally sound, economically prosperous, and socially equitable.

This is an interesting article i found by Edwin Heathcote, architecture critic at Financial Times.

Shapes of hope By Edwin Heathcote Friday Apr 25 2008 19:35 A century ago the world looked towards London as a beacon of enlightened housing. The combination of an arts and crafts architecture that saw the home as the heart of culture and society, a progressive London County Council concerned with building decent homes for the working classes and a moment in which a generation of radical and serious architects was at work produced a rich and influential seam of domestic design. A century before that exquisitely restrained city terraces had developed a formal but flexible language of urban form that has rarely been bettered. And between those two peaks the Victorians built the endless rows of inventive and robust terraces that still form the backbone of the city's property market. But, in the past century, not much that is admirable, influential or important has happened. No one has looked to London recently to provide a paradigm for modern housing. Yet property prices are absurdly high and, even beneath the threatening clouds of a slump, demand remains strong. Perhaps London is so good in other ways that it doesn't need innovation in housing - but that is no excuse. A new exhibition at New London Architecture is studying recent developments and looking at the big issues that face the city's housing: density, mixed use, design, affordability, public realm and so on. But its particular angle involves building sustainably into the centre of a heavily developed city. Growing faster than any other European city and with an estimated 700,000 new inhabitants forecast to arrive over the next 15 years, this exhibition looks not just at the grand masterplans but also at what has become known as "densification". Compared with Paris or New York, London is, although it might be surprising, a sparsely populated place. Far greater densities have been achieved elsewhere through the big apartment blocks ubiquitous from Barcelona to Berlin. Among the trendiest of concepts in contemporary planning is "densification", an ugly but useful word that describes the trick of housing more people on the same ground area - without creating slums. The schemes exhibited here are smart, innovative and ingenious and begin to challenge the awful predominance of the mass-housebuilders' off-the-shelf executive home, which has become a housing equivalent of chain-store corporatisation, of cloned high streets. A water tower converted by SUSD Architects for the designer Tom Dixon produced an enigmatic and hugely spacious residence at the shabby end of a chic district. Extending nine storeys into the air, it blends the industrial aesthetic of the original tower with a 1970s concrete brutalism (Ernö Goldfinger's Trellick Tower lurks nearby) and is a fine and rather funny intervention into the landscape of stuccoed terraces. Noho Square, by Make and developers Candy & Candy, and Printworks, by Glen Howells Architects, cover the other end of the scale - major mixed-use interventions into already dense urban fabric, the first on the site of the former Middlesex Hospital in Fitzrovia, the latter in a former railway coal-store building in Elephant and Castle, south London. Both schemes attempt to create sustainable urban communities. They do this not just by providing mixed-use accommodation (a blend of shops, workspaces, offices and apartments) but by ensuring a mix of social and private housing. The tabular content relating to this article is not available to view. Apologies in advance for the inconvenience caused. Two schemes also deserve a closer look for their impressive greenness. Attempting to achieve rigorous eco standards devised in Germany, 5th Studio's development at Fairfield Road, Bow, east London, derives most of its heating from the warmth generated by domestic appliances, from cookers to computers, and keeping it all with very high insulation. A design by Duggan Morris Architects in Barmeston Road, Catford, south London, re-uses an existing building and a former yard in a sophisticated and dense piece of infill that nevertheless manages to maintain a significant element of landscaped space. If the even smaller interventions, the houses springing up in the city's suddenly valuable cracks and crevices, seem to be missing from the exhibition, they appear in a rich programme of events and talks by architects to accompany it over the weekend of May 17 and 18. Architects are often at their most experimental and most innovative when working for themselves and so their own houses can become showcases for what others wouldn't allow them to do, before they see it for themselves. Sarah Featherstone will talk about her superb east London house, a poetic, inventive and extremely elegant piece of urban infill in a harsh piece of fast-changing city, while Luke Tozer (of Pitman Tozer Architects) will speak about his extraordinarily slender and deceptively simple house on the other side of the city. Marcus Lee of Flacq Architects will explain his timber-framed Hackney house, a fast-tracked construction that was erected in only three months and looks towards the California Case Study houses of the postwar period for its light, airy, clarity. Other sessions will embrace green issues and, inevitably (this is London after all) value. The consensus of construction in London that stretched from Georgian terraces to council tower blocks has collapsed. There is no prescribed way of building any more, no pattern book, no overarching theory. While London has undoubtedly lost its way in housing since the huge rebuilding programmes of the postwar era, the ad hoc, occasionally eccentric, occasionally intensely inventive spate of interventions has begun to throw up some fascinating buildings. This show eschews the star names whose work appears so often in architecture picture books but it does feature small rays of hope. London, more than most other established western capitals, has a history of piecemeal development, an allergy to grand schemes and its theatrical set pieces have always left gaping gaps between them. What this show begins to do is to examine how the intelligent plugging of those gaps can not only hugely intensify activity in the streets but also squeeze more juice from a city that has still failed to reach its potential. That some of the schemes here are a little bland, that some seem to be using green credentials as a substitute for clarity and that there is virtually nothing here which matches the intelligence and embeddedness of the most sophisticated work in Basel, Porto or Sao Paolo, should not detract. It shows a healthy re-examination of the city, a move away from the ubiquitous and tedious icon and a sustainable pattern of growth within the city's own boundaries.

Research Strategy

3D Site_London

Initial Strategy Diagram

BIG IDEA!

This idea is an evolution from my BA (Hons) final major project that was a mixed-use building that was designed to support the local community from which it is hinged, providing spaces for: learning, performing, refreshing, entertaining, meeting, working, showcasing and accommodating. With the combination of a range of elements derived from the surrounding areas, this proposal encompasses a mix of culture and environments with its aim to break the social divide and the bonds that separate the people that inhabit and work in the area.



Architecture for the Community. Socially responsible design that creates spaces for people and produces environments that matter in the community. Looking at how a specific community can help design or affect its own infrastructure, the ways people interact and how this is used to create a sense of place.



This could be to rework of redundant or derelict space, empty pockets within the urban fabric, or areas of that show a lack of human presence or areas that have an overcrowded presence. Asking the questioning what the community needs or what help this space prosper? This could also be a form of flexible architecture that could move from site to site, something I am looking into…….sustainability within the design, a business model and lifecycle of the project. How might it integrate into the future of London city plan??



To develop multi-functional and layered environments that encompass different types of processes for the creation of new spaces, combining a diverse range users and forming a rationale that draws inspiration from the people it’s designed for and the community in which the project takes place.



My interests also lie in keeping in context sustainable and environmental issues, for example new types of materials or ways of saving energy. Looking at innovative and experimental methods of design and construction and the impact this can have on the overall aesthetic of a space. How can the materiality of a defined space inspire further ways of representing a sites cultural heritage, looking at its historical context to help instigate a model for the future?

Following last weeks tutorial/formative assessment i now need to develop a rationale for my lead question/area of enquiry......

- a case study of elephant & castle.......looking at transport and also investigate canals that run near the area....thames waterways (& shipping canals)

- look into water, landscape and surface architecture............urban splash (business plan)

- Studio Egret West ( south shields riverside project)

- need to produce time schedule

- case studies on southwark and spitalfields looking at the cultural essence with the areas as well as researching the ideals of architect michael sorkin

- look into new technologies and materials.....how might these inform or impact the project?