Award-winning riverside site development
Our project ran over 10 years to regenerate the large riverside site of Kingston Mill which won an RTPI Annual Award for Best National Project of Local Regeneration and Renewal. This recognised in particular the task of bringing together so many conflicting views about the site’s optimum future and resolve an unusual number of technical and viability challenges. But it also had to cross many hurdles presented by heritage policy protection.
The site was close to the main frontage of the Grade I listed Hall built in the early 17th Century whose large country estate spreads out well beyond the town to north and east. How could new buildings of up to five storeys needed to create the mixed-use town scheme the town’s population wanted be accommodated in this context?
The site’s vehicular access was made worse by the 20,000 vehicles a day passing close by the town’s only river crossing, its medieval bridge. We could see the only way to resolve this well would be a one-way loop passing through the most prominent of the site’s many historic industrial buildings and there were several of these. We knew we could not save all of them and the need for a new balancing flood storage had to be created. So how could the demands for preservation be prioritised? Our historic value study, an in-depth options analysis aided by large physical models made a satisfactory resolution possible for all such issues.
