15 minute read
Thamesmead on the Map
London is a city in transition, a city that is rapidly urbanizing to meet the demands of its growing demography. Its multicultural and creative characteristics give it a unique identity, and its River Thames and Thames Estuary serve as London’s gateway to the world. Human settlements, docks, and industrial hubs line the Thames Estuary – and with the growing creative industry and the need for more inclusive infrastructure and accessible resources, the four Londons (north, east, south, and west) must work together to best serve the anticipated rapid growth and proliferating diverse population of London.
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‘Thamesmead on the Map’ is a story about everyday affordability, spatial needs, and artistic endeavor. Located in the southeast area of London between Greenwich and Bexley, Thamesmead is home to a diverse ethnographic makeup. The ‘city in the east’ is poised for sustainable growth strategies at a time where young city dwellers continue to generate micro economies through cultural production throughout London. Thamesmead has a unique cultural heritage, having evolved over the last 50 years - especially as migration patterns have significantly shaped the region. With its iconic Brutalist architecture created during the modernist art movement, Thamesmead is a place where innovative responses to societal changes related to industrialization get seeded into the built environment. The future of Thamesmead is rich and bright with artistic and cultural interest – therefore, ensuring that built environments support diverse lifestyles is key to collective living.
To tell the story of Thamesmead, a group of creatives has been positioned to radically reclaim space in the suburb. The creatives are looking for space to make, live, and be in proximity to a larger network of resources. The story seeks to ask: how might art produce culture? And could culture lay the foundation for a new village built into the network of greater London and the Thames Estuary Production Corridor? A series of planned strategies imagines temporal events, temporary-use agreements, goods trading, small-scale development negotiations, and community interfaces to depict the evolution of Thamesmead in a radical but sustainable method.
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It’s January 31st – the date of the Brexit deal. Shomari has been reading a lot about quiet revolutions – due to the need for bottom-up cultural enterprise and economic opportunity in London. He sees an ad in the Times for a call for submissions on an art installation. The theme is “Open Fences”, and the goal is to jumpstart a cultural movement through beautiful protest. He submitted a letter of interest and is now overjoyed that he’s been assigned to represent East London.
Sho takes the bus to Trafalgar Square and meets with the other artists. Together they plan and make concepts for how the Open Fences would look. It was a difficult meeting with different personalities, but the city reps agreed to ensure that free bus ridership would be offered.
On his way back to Thamesmead, Sho visits the team at Bow Arts and asks if there are any available artists to help curate the installation. With interest, Bow Arts and Peabody make an agreement to let Sho and his partners use the waterfront area.
Fast forward two months to March, the art installations have been built in the landscape. Sho has worked with the existing community to design and fabricate each installation. The installations represent various locations around the world and remind them of memories of home. They visited the Thamesmead waterfront to be able to find the proper placements of each installation.
The Times reports that bus ridership has reached record numbers in Thamesmead and suggest the installation stay up one month longer.
Two months have passed, and Sho reconnects with his music friends. He is contemplating a next move to put Thamesmead on the map, this time through music. Sho and a group of friends meet at the park on Southmere Lake. They invited members of Bow Arts to help with logistics and building a network of musicians for the program. With dialogue and debate, they decide on a set of rules to make the festival happen.
A summer ferry, sponsored by Lendlease, has been planned as part of the music festival sequence. They feel this will continue to help put Thamesmead on the map. To make this incentive work, Sho realizes he must work with people at the local timber yard to figure out how they can build a temporary jetty for a ferry stop on the Thamesmead waterfront. He offers them free festival tickets and his own volunteer time at their shop, in exchange for timber and nails to build the bridge.
Weary that they don’t have enough volunteers to help with their rather ambitious program, they begin setting up tents, trailors, and temporary restrooms - marking space in the parking lot at the Thamesmead Village. They are so excited they set up a rap station in the middle of the parking lot.
Two weeks pass, and the local newspaper reports that the neighbors complained about the noise coming from the across the street. He meets with the neighbors, as they are still enraged about the after-hours noise and the heated discussion startles Sho. He gets frantic and the neighbors end up rewriting the rules of the festival.
Weeks later, the upset neighbors have been enjoying the music across the street, and the festival’s success creates another tension. Abbey Wood Station has been getting record passenger numbers coming through, and Peabody’s Village Center at Southmere gets more foot traffic. Southmere also has a substantial grocery store with a strong community of residents.
Morrisson’s sales are declining, and they agree to lease some of the warehouse to the artists at Bow Arts.
Over the next year, the artists capture several spaces in the parking lot. They make lease deals with Lendlease to make this happen. Lendlease is hopeful that the artists can reinvigorate their town center, and though cautious, are willing to give them a chance. Morrisson’s makes a lease agreement with the artists, and the film and TV production use gets transferred into the space.
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Six months later, Pets & Home and Next are reconsidering their lease offer and have decided to relocate to another shopping center. The artists can capture more square footage to move their music production uses indoors.
The neighbors once again complain about all the foot traffic coming through the area, and there was an accident on the main road. The artists, again, have a meeting with the neighbors to talk about a resolution. Sho even makes a new artist friend from within the neighborhood, although they ask for a Five Guys and H&M be added to the ongoing shopping center program. Sho is confused about the requests and saddened about the accident on the main road. He promises the neighbors that he will at least go to the City to try and figure out a solution to make the road safer..
A year later, Morrison’s sales continue to drop. They notice the vibrancy of the new mini-artist’s village, with many people coming and going to visit the local presence, enjoying the food trucks and live music every Thursday. In a final negotiation, they make a last lease agreement with the neighbors. This time, the space will house a creative workshop for painting and sculpting.
The composite map shows us the ways that usual urban spaces can be reconfigured to accommodate different uses. A new village is taking roots along the Thamesmead waterfront.
It is now January 31st, 2025. The artists are tired of commuting and are eager to live near their workspace. Sho has gotten so busy in the music production studio that he has forgotten about reaching out to the City re: the main road design. He thinks he may be able to redeem himself if he can work with the tired artists to make a plan to bring to the City. Sho calls a meeting with the artists and the neighbors in the parking lot office to create a framework plan.
Solidspace, a local small-scale builder, sets up their office in the parking lot, and the first part of phase 1 introduces 40 modular housing units set up around a shared courtyard. The film producers are ecstatic about living close to where they work and create. It only takes 3 months to build. The existing gas station is now being reappropriated as a public space, and the City is interested in alterative uses for the site.
The arrangement of shipping containers in a linear court allows residents to stack the modular units. Areas adjacent to the loop road are to serve as fully public, entrepreneurial spaces and retail nodes. A green axis and trail connects the lakefront area to the canal trails, and also facilitate drainage from the parking lot.
With the City’s interest in Sho’s proposal for downsizing the main roads, they begin to analyze the existing conditions to think about where possible bicycle routes might fit in. With the extensive and successful bus routes already in place, some challenges have come up with local authority and the neighbors.
The village continues to grow throughout the main parking lot. Sho has worked with the City to rid the gas station, and although he knows about the consequences with the gas station site, they still take the risk to build incremental housing in its place.
Two years have passed, a community has now developed, and education has been a hot topic among the group. Sho is able to work with Bow Arts and EcoSchools, who has been actively seeking out spaces for forms of nature based education.
The modular housing area is now considered a prominent artist’s village well-known in Thamesmead and has been designated as a conservation area. Lendlease agrees to preserve the artist’s village and help maintain its identity.
Reflections
Sowmya Parthasarthy Director, Urban Design & Masterplanning, Arup London
148 Thamesmead Waterfront is an extraordinary project. An unprecedented opportunity to design and develop a new town at the doorstep of both London and the Thames Estuary. Indeed, as the studio project subtitle notes, an opportunity to extend and mend the original Thamesmead district. Planning for the future of Thamesmead demands a wide lens and a holistic approach. It challenges you to think beyond your discipline. It requires bold thinking and collective innovation. It offers the scale and opportunity to be a model for sustainable urbanism fit for our times and the future.
So, what kind of place should Thamesmead be? On the one hand, the type of places that people love has not changed for centuries. Affordable homes, good schools, walkable streets, welcoming open and green spaces, walkable neighborhoods, vibrant local and town centers, a sense of community, wellproportioned and beautiful buildings, and a well-understood hierarchy between public, semi-public, and private space. The old principles of good urban design are all still valid.
But we expect a lot more from our places and cities now. 24/7 digital connectivity, on-demand services delivered to our door, data at our fingertips driving everyday decisions, healthy lifestyle opportunities, diverse cultural experiences, and new working patterns. And in today’s context, our places must also fulfill the aspirations (and requirements) for decarbonization, climate resilience, biodiversity, health, and social value. Such sites can only come to life through open-minded collaboration.
Reflections Urban design has always been a multidisciplinary endeavor, and nowhere is this tested more strongly than at Thamesmead. I was impressed to see this focus on interdisciplinary, holistic thinking at the center of the design studio brief. The early stage of baseline assessment saw the students recognize and embrace this element with well-researched and well-presented findings around climate change, water systems, transport connectivity, demographics, and various socio-economic indicators. I was interested to see how some of these findings helped shape the design concept in later stages of work – the link to the tidal waters of the Thames was a principal determinant, as was the desire to make a wellconnected community based on walking, cycling, and public transport.
At times, I felt that the sheer volume and availability of data presented at the assessment stage obscured more than it clarified. Students of urbanism must learn to work through this complexity, to balance analytical thought (populating the spreadsheet) with an intuition for design proposition (sketching the idea). Global drivers of change are critical considerations for city makers, but are we placing enough value on ‘smaller’ everyday experiences? As professional consultants, we have to navigate multiple perspectives and prioritize objectives during our work. While working on Thamesmead, city-level stakeholders overwhelmingly spoke about housing provision, net-zero targets, flood management, and design quality. Residents said of not having an ATM at walking distance, not being able to walk to the river, and lack of places for young people to hang out. Our job as urban designers is to make sure that all voices are heard, and all scales are considered – as a profession; we are still learning to do that well.
I was also keenly interested in how the students translated early findings and ambitious sustainability aspirations into design ideas, spatial layouts, and specific proposals. For the most part, the rigor with which the students built the narrative was credible. But in this context, I would like to observe how easy it is to make assumptions about performance outcomes of places without following up on testing if that’s true. Shouldn’t urban designers do the equivalent of a building post-occupancy analysis? I am sure we would all learn a lot. As design professionals working for the ‘client’ responsible for ‘delivery,’ we are accountable for translating utopian design concepts and high-level sustainability ambitions into tangible actions. Design studios and university research can play a huge role in testing and exploring the sustainability performance of our places and communities and provide a body of guidance for change over time. I want to acknowledge the challenge of undertaking a studio project so dependent on understanding local context during the pandemic, preventing students from experiencing the site in person. Under the circumstances, the understanding of context and outcomes was commendable. A final observation: I enjoyed seeing the group dynamics of the design ‘teams’ and how they navigated the brief and divided tasks amongst themselves. It was not unlike how professional teams organize themselves, and the same tension between creative collaboration and individual input under the pressure of time was well-replicated. I hope that in itself was a good learning experience!
150 As design professionals working for the ‘client’ responsible for ‘delivery,’ we are accountable for translating utopian design concepts and high-level sustainability ambitions into tangible actions. Design studios and university research can play a huge role in testing and exploring the sustainability performance of our places and communities and provide a body of guidance for change over time.
I want to acknowledge the challenge of undertaking a studio project so dependent on understanding local context during the pandemic, preventing students from experiencing the site in person. Under the circumstances, the understanding of context and outcomes was commendable. A final observation: I enjoyed seeing the group dynamics of the design ‘teams’ and how they navigated the brief and divided tasks amongst themselves. It was not unlike how professional teams organize themselves, and the same tension between creative collaboration and individual input under the pressure of time was well-replicated. I hope that in itself was a good learning experience!
Extending and Mending Thamesmead: the town of tomorrow, today
Instructors
Kathryn Firth
Report Design
Sai Joshi Natasha Harkison
Report Editor
Kathryn Firth Sai Joshi Natasha Harkison
Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture
Sarah Whiting
Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design
Rahul Mehrotra
Copyright © 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without prior written permission from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Text and images © 2022 by their authors.
Harvard University Graduate School of Design 48 Quincy Street Cambridge, MA 02138
gsd.harvard.edu Acknowledgments
Guest Speakers
Selina Mason, Director of Urban Design, Lendlease Paula Hirst, Strategy Director, Project Manager, Thamesmead Consultant Team Sowmya Parthasarthy, Director of Masterplanning and Urban Design, Arup Richard de Cani, Global Planning Leader, Arup Ian Carradice, Director, Arup Ben Smith, Director for Energy and Climate Change, Arup Dr Phil Askew, Director Landscape & Placemaking, Peabody Ellen Halstead, Director of Strategy & Programme for Thamesmead, Peabody John Lewis, Executive Director for Thamesmead, Peabody Adriana Marques, Head of Cultural Strategy for Thamesmead, Peabody Kate Willard, OBE, Thames Estuary Envoy and Chair of the Thames Estuary Growth Board
Final Review Critics
Anne Tate, RISD Brie Hensold, Agency LP David Gamble, Harvard GSD Ian Carradice, Arup Jungyoon Kim, Harvard GSD Rodrigo Guerra, NBBJ Selina Mason, Lendlease Sowmya Parthasarathy, Arup Will Hunter, Loeb Fellow, Harvard GSD
Workshop Liaisons
Gordon Davis, St Paul’s Academy Nadia Kassab Oghlo, Peabody
The editors have attempted to acknowledge all sources of images used and apologize for any errors or omissions.
