The architects of two west London housing schemes – Brentford Lock West by Mae and Umpire View by Sarah Wigglesworth architects – consider the challenges of new development in the outer boroughs

Photos
Rory Gardiner, Ståle Eriksen, Tim Smyth

The recent announcement by the Office for National Statistics that London will need 844,000 new homes in the next 25 years – a 24 per cent increase on the existing total — represents a significant challenge for planners, policymakers and architects alike. The boroughs with the greatest predicted growth are in east London where, for example, the number of households in Tower Hamlets is predicted to rise by almost 50 per cent. But what scope is there for densification in west London, where there are fewer large former industrial sites, and patterns of low-density suburban living are now well established? Here, the architects of two diverse new housing projects in the outer boroughs of west London – Umpire View and Brentford Lock West Block E– discuss the ambitions of those schemes and consider the challenges of the future.

Umpire View,
Sarah Wigglesworth Architects

Umpire View is a development by Notting Hill Housing of 27 homes on a backland site in Harrow that was formerly amenity space owned by a local church. The church first considered developing the site almost 30 years ago, and made two outline applications that were refused in 2007. In the face of local opposition, an outline application by John Thompson & Partners was approved in 2012, and Sarah Wigglesworth Architects (SWA) was appointed following the sale of the site to the developer. With footprints of the houses fixed by the outline consent, SWA began “the tricky job of trying to squeeze all of this accommodation in, and make it compliant”, says project director Toby Carr.

The £4.3m Umpire View scheme designed by Sarah Wigglesworth Architects comprises 27 homes for Notting Hill Housing Trust, located on part of a under-used greenfield site adjacent to a church, vicarage and church hall.

The housing forms an L-shape around the retained green space, which has been transferred to public ownership. The scheme comprises a mix of affordable rental houses and flats, intermediate housing units and a minority of market sale houses and flats. (12 houses and 15 flats in total). There are two different house types – a three-bed, four-person home and a four-bed, five-person home, bringing variety to the streetscape. Flats are located in small blocks at the ends and corner of the development, and the requirement to work within pre-existing plot boundaries produced a relatively high number of apartment types.

The scheme “interprets the Edwardian vernacular buildings of surrounding streets, using materials which complement the adjacent red brick and clay tile roof of St George’s Church and Hall”, says SWA.

Toby Carr, Sarah Wigglesworth Architects
“At Umpire View the outline consent was for semi-detached houses. In fact the houses are so close together that a perimeter block around the edge of the site would have been a better model to pursue in terms of density, but that would have been a non-starter in the area, and given the history of this site, by the time we were on board there was no appetite in the project team to venture into those discussions.

So we began with the question of how to work with the semi-detached house model, and how to instil a sense of neighbourliness, or at least allow an opportunity for that to happen. Part of that was about creating generous thresholds, in which residents might spend a bit of time hanging around. That drove the inset entrances, and then the gable frontage which wasn’t in the previous scheme.

We worked for quite a long time with a planner on secondment from the Greater London Authority to the borough, who could see that because of the way the project was set up, there wouldn’t be a quality champion, and that as architects we had little weight to negotiate over material changes that the contractor wanted to make. So the local authority was able to make sure that key decisions around, for example, the material of the windows, were adhered to.

We also worked closely with the planners on the elevations. It’s a simple scheme and from the start we wanted to avoid developing a suburban house that was a pastiche of different styles, but rather to design something that had good spatial qualities, and then some things that could be built in that might enhance the social aspect of the scheme, like deep-set entrances and external seats: things that could be built into the project and therefore couldn’t be stripped out. Within the constraints that existed we wanted to take forward a type of suburban housing that could be more contemporary than the pastiche that you see elsewhere.”

Alex Ely, Mae
“Umpire View is a good example of how to protect some open space – which is still very generous despite having lost a strip around the edges. It’s also a good model of ‘supernormal’, of how to push to achieve certain things that would not feature in a typical housebuilders’ scheme.

The church and church hall are notably bigger than any surrounding housing so one could make a case for pushing the height and form of new housing, but then more parking would be needed as the public transport accessibility is poor. Car-usage will change in time, and we are doing a number of car-free schemes in places where accessibility is really good. Even in more edge-of-town sites you can argue to reduce parking numbers below local policy if you’ve got alternatives like car clubs or good cycle networks that can supplement the lack of public transport.

Infill developments like Umpire View will increasingly be expected to meet housing pressures and the London Plan targets. The GLA expects a lot more proactive planning on the part of boroughs to hunt out those sites, not just wait for them to come forward.

If authorities are quicker at identifying and allocating opportunity sites, then the debate about development can be put aside, and the conversation can be about the quality of development. At Umpire View there is a long history of opposition to development. If architects and developers can say to local residents ‘Development is a given, it’s in the Local Area Plan, so let’s talk about getting something that’s workable and attractive for you, and achieves our objectives’, that’s got to be better than wrangling.

However, opposition to such suburban developments like Umpire View is very real because its in people’s back yards and is going to change their outlook or access to open space. At the same time we have a pretty poor debate about the value of the green belt. There’s a perception that there’s huge opposition to development of the green belt, but that might be largely in the mind of journalists. There’s probably more real opposition to developments in Metroland than to putting the same number of houses in the green belt. It’s easy to say that we need to build within currently defined metropolitan areas, but it would be perverse to lose too much local amenity space for the purpose of saving the green belt.”

Brentford Lock West – Block E,
Mae Architects

Developed in two phases by Waterside Places, a joint venture between the Canal & River Trust and Muse Developments, Brentford Lock West comprises around 520 new homes on brownfield land facing onto the Grand Union Canal, close to where it joins the Thames at Brentford Dock. Within a simple grid of streets planned by Urbed, the first phase was designed by Duggan Morris, Mikhail Riches and Karakusevic Carson. Mae has designed all the buildings of the second phase, which comprises Block E, overlooking the canal and providing 42 dual-aspect market sale apartments, and a further 115 homes behind, in four pavilion buildings linked by townhouses. Mae’s aim was to build on the “convivial neighbourhood atmosphere” by creating “something with civic qualities that contributes to the city”, says practice principal Alex Ely.

Block E comprises two ‘pavilions’ linked by a lower block in which there is a double-height foyer that Ely envisages being used for events or residents’ meetings, and which allows passers-by to see the river from the street. “Little moves like that can extend the sense of public generosity”, says Ely. “They’re not expensive, but they do require an attitude on the part of the architect”. The set-back link block also creates a small piazza-like space in front of the building.

The building’s palette of brick and concrete nods to the site’s industrial past, as does the saw-tooth roof which is also exploited to create vaulted, skylit interior spaces on the upper floor.

Alex Ely, Mae
“Brentford Lock West (BLW) is an edge-of-high-street, brownfield site, which does push you towards an apartment block with a shoulder height of minimum five storeys. That seems right for its setting, even though just across the river there are two-storey houses. Nearby there are schemes whose density is significantly higher: very heavy, fat blocks, deep plans, double-loaded corridors and single-aspect flats. We’ve gone for mid-rise, mid-density, where you maintain a comfortable human scale, and get daylight into the courtyards, and we’ve done that through the layout of the pavilion blocks.

It’s important in housing to identify the important moves early on and make sure that they are an integral part of the layout and also part of pre-application planning discussions. Getting support for those ideas – in the case of BLW the saw-tooth roof, loggia balconies and the atrium lobby – meant that when we had challenges dealing with inflated construction costs, and were trying to find savings, it would have been unpalatable to change them. Instead we were able to have a creative conversation about what could add value, or be trimmed, elsewhere. We could convince the local authority that it was right to add an additional storey to two of the pavilions, generating sufficient additional revenues to protect some of the qualities that we wanted in the scheme, and which they also recognised and wanted to help us protect.”

Toby Carr, SWA
“At Brentford Lock West it’s interesting to see that aspects of the wider scheme refer to the history of the area, and the art deco heritage of the Great West Road’s Golden Mile. Thinking also of the situations found further out, in Metroland, it’s possible that historical references become too fixed in the minds of planning authorities, and get in the way of providing an appropriate density or mix of housing. One of the challenges we face is to identify what are the characteristics of suburbia now – to pick out what people desire from that kind of space, how you can preserve the good bits, but also what would be possible with different infrastructure.

We need to look carefully at what an area is, rather than what people think it is. In much of suburbia, buildings that people think of as two-storey houses have swollen to three or four storeys. It’s much more dense than it looks, but perceptions dictate what we can build there. As London grows there’s a need to challenge those preformed ideas about what a place is and say instead ‘Well, this is what it could be’. One of the brilliant things about Brentford Lock West is that you can go out onto a balcony and look across a canal to a bit of green space. You’ve got a view that you wouldn’t have in most urban settings, but at an urban density.”