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Wednesday, 31 May 2006 | Levent OZLER
The Bottle Store
Stockwell London
Acting on behalf of City & Provincial Properties, Hawkins\Brown have been awarded planning permission by the London Borough of Lambeth for the redevelopment of the Watney Mann brewery site in Stockwell, South London.
The Bottle Store development will regenerate the site of the former nineteenth-century brewery into a vibrant centre. It promises to be an exemplary mixed-use inner city development, incorporating private, shared-ownership and social rented housing, commercial office space, small business start-up units, retail units and a health centre.
The £53 million regeneration project will create 290 new homes and the potential for 400 new jobs for the London Borough of Lambeth.
The proposed scheme retains the original 1960's bottling store, which will be re-clad with a semi- translucent façade to reveal the existing structure and expose a new hub of activity. Featuring a street façade of concrete panels with inset coloured glass lenses, it will be the flagship building of the development, referencing the history of the site. A new three-storey block will be built to the East and will provide flexible workspace for business start-ups from 280 sq ft. The two blocks will comprise 89,000 sq ft of new business units. The Bottle Store will also provide 19 duplex apartments on the upper two floors.
The remaining warehouse building, which was built in the late sixties and is currently used for archive storage, will be demolished, creating space for an additional 271 new-build residential units. Over 60% of these will be affordable, exceeding the current recommendation in the London Plan.
The units are arranged as three blocks to the West of the site, culminating in a more permeable elevation onto Lingham Street than the existing warehouse. The three blocks are arranged around two landscaped private courtyards.
At street level 9 small retail spaces face onto Stockwell Green. As the principal interface with the locality the streetscape will be re-landscaped, providing spaces to sit, relax and have lunch.
Community activity is currently focused on Lingham Street, to the West of the site, where facilities include St Andrew's Church, a Community Hall, and a primary school. A 9,500 sq ft health clinic will replace the neighbouring disused pub and depot site, enhancing Lingham Street and providing GP facilities within walking distance of the new residents.
Materials include green glazed brickwork, ceramic rainscreen cladding, concrete, glazing and timber. A horizontal datum of green glazed brick at ground level unifies the three residential blocks, health clinic and sunken garden to the south of the Bottle Store. The buildings feature green and brown roofs, which will enhance the biodiversity of the site.
Hawkins\Brown have worked with Max Fordham LLP to ensure a reduction in energy demand and to make the scheme more environmentally sustainable. The scheme exceeds the Mayor of London's energy policy, by providing over 10% of the buildings' energy from renewable sources on site, in the deployment of solar energy collection and borehole cooling. Reduction in energy demand is achieved with a highly insulated facade, design for airtightness and use of heat recovery, so that the space heating requirement of each dwelling is virtually zero. A 55920 sq ft solar thermal array, the largest array currently proposed in the UK, will meet 40% of annual hot water demand.
The scheme was submitted to London Borough of Lambeth following a local consultation programme and public exhibition. The project will go on site in September with an estimated completion date of Spring 2008.
Hawkins\Brown
Having been in practice for 17 years, Hawkins\Brown are among the generation of UK architects now hitting their mature stride. Having earned a reputation for delivering successful mixed-use urban development, the practice has recently won a string of major new commissions in the public sector. These include a new mixed use civic and cultural centre for the Midlands former steel town, Corby, and the refurbishment of the UK's largest listed social housing project - Park Hill in Sheffield - in partnership with leading regeneration developer Urban Splash and the design of the Tottenham Court Road Crossrail interchange in central London.
At present Hawkins\Brown are working on a substantial number of residential schemes in the UK, working with clients from the private housing sector as well as a number of housing associations. One of the practice's major developments currently on site is a £14m development of 208 key worker flats Godstone Rd, Whyteleafe, Surrey. In London the practice have received planning consent for their Two Towers scheme in Poplar, one of the highest density schemes ever approved in the capital, As a member of Building Futures Group at CABE, partner Russell Brown is actively involved in policy making in the housing design sector.
Hawkins\Brown: http://www.dexigner.com/directory/detail/7896/
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