Residential
VULCAN WAY ISLINGTON
CLIENT: LONDON BOROUGH OF ISLINGTON / HOMES FOR ISLINGTON
Conversion of ground level garages and transformation of a barren expanse of tarmac into a new residential Mews, of 17 new mixed tenure homes, a 5 bedroomed 7-person house and a 4 bedroomed 5 -person house, both with gardens. The London Borough of Islington redevelopment was quickly occupied and the private sale flats sold out immediately!
Burrell Foley Fischer have long advocated the infilling of local authority sites on estates where the ‘waste land’ creates security and privacy problems due to a poorly defined public realm making it open to abuse. We now have an established track record of this type of remedial approach, working with local authorities and private landowners. We have a strong track record of award-winning schemes in very challenging locations and a high success rate of achieving planning consent in the shortest possible time scale.
In our work for the London Borough of Islington - Homes for Islington (HFI) - we reviewed the Council’s existing sites taking an holistic, inclusive, long-term view to highlight negative land use and make proposals to show how sites across the Borough could be advantageously developed.
The ten completed projects provide 50 new dwellings for the Borough and are the outcome of our work which began in 2009 on a borough- wide study of land usage to identity potential housing development sites. In all BFF looked at 13 different estates and land in council ownership; we are currently developing proposals for a further 15 substantial multi-storey residential dwellings across three Estates.
We audited areas of grass, tarmac and hard landscape and identified at-risk boundaries. Considered innovative designs have provided new dwellings with a higher percentage of site coverage devoted to secure “green” amenity space and gardens whilst also eliminating insecure boundaries and potential for anti- social behaviour.
The ten completed planning applications were all delivered as part of a fast-track design programme being designed, submitted and approved within a 16 week period.
“On behalf of Homes for Islington and London Borough of Islington, I want to express our thanks to you all and your teams for all the excellent and very hard work you’ve all carried out over the last few months, weeks, days and nights(!).
A 100% record is not bad, and I have to say that I’d be hard pressed to find a similar situation in the development world, where through dedicated team work and a shared sense of purpose, this number of planning applications were prepared and submitted in one go, particularly from a situation only a few months ago when most of the schemes were at level zero in terms of detail!”