Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea Competition Entry Awarded Second Place
Apartments, Portobello Road, London, W10
The Stephen Alderdice Studio designed competition entry for an 80 apartment, residential-led regeneration scheme near the Portobello Road in Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in London, has been awarded second place in an open competition.
The competition entry seeks to deliver 80,593 sqft of residential-led development. The accommodation is split across 4 buildings that start at 3-storeys at the Portobello Road and increase to 7-storeys at a new Community Hub at the Notting Hill Primary School and Youth Centre near Ladbroke Grove Station. The development adopts a new elevated pedestrian link which introduces connectivity between the neighbourhood and district centres at Portobello Road and Ladbroke Grove, reactivating the historic “Green Lane” which pre-dated the Portobello Road. The housing mix seeks to exceed the tenure split of recent Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea guidance and offer 50% affordable housing. The quantum offers 80 apartments and 216 habitable rooms.
The narrative of the development starts over three hundred of years ago with a winding lane that led from the gravel pits at Kensington (now Notting Hill Gate) through the fields to Kensal Green to the north. This lane was called “Green’s Lane” presumably because the destination was Kensal Green as well as the character of the route itself. Today, the site is not a winding lane, but instead an embankment fringe to carriageways and railways that connect the neighbourhoods of London. In the midst of the evolution of the city, the old winding lane has been lost. As the carriageways determined urban planning outcomes in earlier generations, the loss in this neighbourhood was extended to pedestrian linkage and legible and human place making.
In 1740, the farmhouse at Green Lane was renamed to celebrate a military victory in Panama, where the British won the town of Puerto Bello, Spanish for beautiful town. After the railways were built locally in 1864, the Farmhouse at “Portobello” was sold to the Little Sisters of the Poor who built St Joseph’s Convent in the orchard of the farmhouse, for the Dominican Order. In England, this ancient order was referred to as “the Black Friars.” The sisters were influential in feeding the poor and driving transformation in Portobello. Over time, food continued to be exchanged in this place and sold on the streets of Portobello, but it started with an orchard and with the friars.
We have a vision for the site which introduces the winding pedestrian link in the spirit of a Green Lane and in so doing, connect the neighbourhood and district centres of today’s Portobello Road and Ladbroke Grove. Just as the story started with the farmhouse orchard, so we seek to introduce biodiversity in the public realm linear park, as well as the common outdoor amenity spaces for the development, in cascading terraces from that new link. We are delighted to be offered the opportunity to bid for this exciting venture, which we have nicknamed “Blackfriars Green Lane, Portobello.”
The proposed development forms a sequence of buildings on one side of a new east-west linear park that remodels the existing railway embankment and provides a setting for the buildings as new public realm. It is proposed to plant this new route with species that encourage bio-diversity, partly in recognition that the land in its present condition already forms a green buffer to the large rail and road infrastructure beside it. By encouraging the pedestrian connection and bio-diversity, it is hoped to bring fresh ‘lungs’ to this heavily trafficked and polluted part of the city.
The development seeks to make efficient use of the land available, with a PTAL rating of 5 and a setting which could be described as ‘Urban’, the proposal brings forward density at 532 habitable rooms per hectare, 2.7 habitable rooms per unit and 197 units per hectare. These figures reside in the medium to upper ranges of the London Plan Density Figures.
Part of the challenge of the site and the innovation of the development is how the changing topography of the land can be recognized and celebrated in order to provide a new neighbourhood that finds its identity in this place. The first way that constraints are being used in a creative way is to form cascading outdoor amenity spaces between the new buildings. These cascading urban gardens are south-facing and provide the opportunity for upper level apartments to enjoy a visual connection with communal amenity space for each building. The backdrop to the gardens is undeniably urban in character with the elevated transport arteries framed by the buildings on either side.
The second celebration of constraint is in the recognition of the change in level and the scale from the relatively domestic scale of the Lancaster Road to the south, to the massive infrastructural scale of the railway and the elevated Westway carriageway is both a challenge but also an opportunity. The development establishes a scale which mediates between the domesticity of Lancaster Road and Portobello Road by establishing a 3-storey datum, this rises to engage with the scale of the carriageway with a 7-storey building as the development progresses toward Ladbroke Grove railway station.
The approach taken in developing the site is one of ‘completing’ a historic perimeter block. By seeking to mend the incision made by successive road and rail interventions in respect to the quality of streets and public realm, to it is hoped that the development will not only ‘fit’ with historic neighbours, but will encourage a more complete integrated piece of place making in the locality in the tradition of streets, squares and gardens that London enjoys.
The building design is intended to be high quality and contemporary, but also traditional in the use of masonry materials, balconies and ironwork and relief in façade which offers a sense robustness and permanence. The decorative ironwork is based upon a motif from the history of the locality – the 8-pointed star of the Dominican (Blackfriars) order.