Edgware Town Centre, London Borough of Barnet, for Ballymore and Places for London, with Howells and Gustafson Porter + Bowman

Edgware Town Centre masterplan will deliver 3,365 new homes, nearly half of them affordable. Plans total £1.7bn investment to double commercial, retail and leisure space. 42,700sqm will be allocated for new shops, restaurants, cinema and leisure centre. Office and work spaces will total 4,600sqm. The plan includes 4.8ha of green and open space, with the new 1.9ha Deans Brook Nature Park.

Who is on the project team? (designer, consultants, etc)

Masterplanners: Howells Landscape

Architects: Gustafson Porter + Bowman

Sainsbury’s Store Architects: Hutchinson Architects

Planning Consultants: Savills

Services Consultant, Structural Engineers and Transport Consultants: Mott Macdonald

Mott Macdonald are a global engineering, management and development consultancy.

Describe the context of this project, its neighbourhood and people.

400 years ago Edgware was a resting place for travellers of the Roman Road, on their way from London to St Albans. It grew into a village, then a small market town with traders and a cattle fair and remained a farming community into the 1800s. Edgware was an important stopping point; inns and blacksmiths lined the high street. As the population of London expanded, the road became more important; travellers heading north out of the city had to pay a fee to use the highway which benefited Edgware directly. The opening of a tramline along Edgware Road in 1904 brought a new link into central London. But it wasn’t until the Underground was extended from Golders Green in 1924 that the area became a modern London suburb - with a bustling centre, leafy streets, and rolling countryside nearby. Edgware represented the chance to live a better life with fresher air, only 33 minutes from Charing Cross. Today, Edgware sits in the bottom 10% of least dense but best-connected places in London, and in the lowest 25% of healthy streets in London. Edgware is a diverse community: 44% of residents from a non-white background and a younger age profile than the rest of Barnet. But it lacks a diverse town offer that provides sufficient housing, retail, public realm, and quality of design. The emergence of the Edgware Town Centre masterplan by Ballymore and TfL marks the potential beginning of Edgware’s next chapter, to the next 100 years and beyond.

Please describe your approach to this future place and its mix of uses. How will it function as a vibrant place? How does it knit into, and serve the needs of, the wider area?

The project team has consulted closely with the community and stakeholders to gain insights around how the development can best serve the local community. The team has met almost 3,000 people and received around 3,000 comments, which has been invaluable in guiding design and adaptation. Major investment and regeneration of the Highstreet will create an attractive place to visit of which residents can be proud. New footpaths, crossings, lighting, seating, landscaping, trees, together will reflect a renewed sense of the importance of Edgware town centre within the community. New leisure and family-friendly spaces will invite vibrancy. A new cinema, library, restaurants and cafes, fitness and health facilities, meeting places, combine with new and returning retailers including Sainsburys, all wrapping a new pedestrianised town square. New homes for multi-generational occupiers, including young people, students, families and those in later life, will be provided in a mix of tenures including market sale, rental, shared ownership, and affordable rent. New homes will be contemporary in design, while being sympathetic to existing buildings thanks to a design code that takes cues from local architecture. A more user-friendly tube and bus interchange will promote increased use of public transport, while future electrification of the bus network will reduce noise and air pollution. A new public park and two town squares will give Edgware more room to breathe, and access opened to previously hidden wild green spaces, with pedestrian friendly routes linking adjoining neighbourhoods, together with cycle interventions.

What is the environmental impact of the project? How will the carbon use and material impact of the development be mitigated? What is the sustainability strategy?

Our design puts sustainability at its heart and responds to local characteristics and context together with a bespoke design code developed with net zero principles and a green and diverse town centre at its core. Our proposals promote modal shift, with new walking and cycling routes opening up the town centre and promoting active travel. The design approach has unlocked significant public realm with 400 new trees and 1.8ha of new planting as well as opening up access to green space closed off for almost 100 years, by creating the 4.7 acre Deans Brook Nature Park. The design team has been consistently challenged by the Strategic Sustainability adviser to push every element of design to make improvements on a low carbon approach, targeting zero emissions once in operation and includes the use of entirely renewable energy sources, coupled with the use of technologies such as an ambient temperature community heat network and roof mounted PV panels allowing the project to make considerable improvements against GLA baselines. The design process has been guided by the market leading TfL Sustainable Development Framework (SDF). The rigour and transparency of the measurement of the impact of a development by the SDF has been recognised by GRESB with a five star rating. This approach has allowed us to develop the designs of the project to minimise carbon use and mitigate adverse impacts allowing the project to seek to achieve sustainability performance accreditations such as BREAMM Outstanding, HQM 5 star and TfL SDF Leading Practice.

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