Staiths South Bank - Design Process

Design Process

Wayne and his wife, Gerardine, complimented the existing professional team rather than replacing any part of it, although there was a change of Architect in order to provide a clean break from previous design studies. There remained a need for a team of housing development design professionals as the Hemingways were concept driven and did not claim to be able to provide detailed technical information which would still be required for regulatory approval and construction.

The project team comprised;

Hemingway Design

IDP Partnership, Newcastle upon Tyne (Architects)

Glen Kemp, Gateshead (Landscape Architects)- note that for the purposes of achieving the desired Homezone, Glen Kemp were given design responsibility for the public realm in its entirety, replacing much of the conventional highway design role

Arup, Newcastle (Civil and Structural Engineers)

Hall & Partners, Newcastle upon Tyne (Cost Consultants)

As mentioned previously, the sampling, analysis and design for the remediation of the site was dealt with by specialist sub contractor AIG Remediation, with Arup undertaking a parallel role monitoring post reclamation contamination and ground engineering information.

In addition to the design team, a North East Public Relations firm, Cool Blue PR, were engaged by the developers to assist in managing media interest and the production of marketing material.

The Hemingway's approach was to follow European models of large scale housing, in particular the modern design aesthetic of newbuild housing in Malmo and the use of Homezone shared circulation routes mixing pedestrians with vehicles, as practiced in the Dutch Woonerf. At the time, the development was the largest newbuild Homezone in the UK. This was an ironic turn in the development of this style of shared external circulation space, as these were experimented with in Warrington and other English newbuild housing in the early 1970s, before being taken up on continental Europe and developed into the predominant residential street form in the Netherlands.

Wayne and Gerardine's conceptual aesthetic and functional ideas were interpreted into a gridlike circulation layout creating horseshoes of around 20 terraced properties backing onto a shared garden space, enclosed & gated to provide privacy and security. These groupings around shared gardens were intended to create a tangible sense of neighbourhood, each grouping and garden being different to the next.

Initial pre planning consultation with the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, (the Government's advisor on architecture, urban design and public space), produced some adverse comments on the 'grid like' street pattern which had resulted from creating these groups of homes. Much time was spent considering whether the grid pattern would be apparent at street level as many of the long vistas were broken by staggers in junctions. In the event, this combination of deliberately blocked long views and a 'busy' public realm design, limited the perception of the overall layout for anyone stood within the Homezone or garden areas.

While the Hemingways' influence was to cover all aspects of the project, Gerardine was particularly effective in selecting external materials which were interesting for both their colour and texture. Research into the durability and cost of the proposed materials was often inconclusive as not only were they not already in use for housing construction, they were often not even available in the UK.

Despite the elevational treatments being unconventional, Gateshead Council exerted relatively little influence on these and instead concentrated their comments and concerns on the public realm design, most particularly the Homezone areas. It was these Homezones that became the single most contentious aspect of the scheme, involving frequent meetings of 12 to 15 people, (with representatives from the Council, George Wimpey City and the professional team), solely to discuss how the Homezones could function without compromising safety.

The Homezone, despite being prototyped in the UK in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was at the time alien to most of established highway design practice in the UK. The much evolved and refined Dutch version, the Woonerf, is supported by legislation which gives pedestrians priority over vehicles within these shared streets. This inverts the expectation of UK motorists, who would expect a pedestrian in the carriageway to give way to a vehicle.

Resolving these legislative differences involved the involvement of central Government officers who were already aware of various other Homezone projects around the UK. All of these projects, (whether newbuild or remodelling existing streets), suffered from a mismatch between their design intent to create a higher quality of public realm which could be actively used by residents with the existing legislation that presumed anyone standing in the road was inviting an accident.

The support of central Government included an award of Homezone grant towards the additional costs involved in the creation of a more complex public realm. This grant was specific to external works costs in the first phase of the development so would provide early support for the design principles being established for the project as a whole.

It was only after many months of negotiation and compromise that a workable public realm design was achieved. The key to finally obtaining the Council's consent was the combination of a sophisticated design solution prepared jointly by Glen Kemp and Arup with a management regime prepared by George Wimpey Citynd CPM, the Managing Agents who would act on behalf of residents to maintain the unadopted and communally owned elements of the development.