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Masterplanning Stratford City The masterplan had to balance vision, certainty and open-endedness


for the infrastructure, such as bridges and utilities, which could connect and serve the site. The designs evolved over several years, with


RPS helping to choreograph the whole process. Fletcher Priest and West 8 joined Arup as joint masterplanners in 2002. West 8 were to embed public realm and landscaping into the very heart of the scheme, while the Fletcher Priest team had an understanding of identity and communication issues arising from its founders’ origins with design consultancy. This was particularly important for a project that would exist in virtual form for many years prior to implementation.


JONATHAN KENDALL


Fletcher Priest Architects


One of the most memorable aspects of the initial masterplanning stages was the strong sense of teamworking and collaboration – not only from the


consultants but also with the client group. As might be expected given the scale of the project, there were a large number of people involved, and an even wider range of external parties always willing to lend an opinion. But at the heart of the design process was a relatively small number of people who shared an attitude that they were privileged to be working on something special.


The client team Having been established as the landowner for the sites along the high-speed rail line, London and Continental Railways Ltd (LCR) sought development partners for each location to bring expertise and financial support. LCR, led by Stephen Jordan, was a small organisation at the outset and throughout the design and construction process. It formed partnerships with others and achieved its remit by exercising the levers of government and through the resources of the wider project teams. Through a process of bidding, a joint venture of Chelsfield plc and Stanhope plc was appointed; this was formalised as Stratford City Developments Ltd. Chelsfield and Stanhope both had strong regeneration credentials, having delivered the Paddington Basin development and Broadgate respectively.


The design team Arup was appointed by Chelsfield and Stanhope to support their bid to LCR and, subsequently, started to develop proposals for the site, integrating masterplanning, infrastructure and environmental strategies. The proposals gradually evolved over many years, gathering consensus and building the scale of ambition. With such a long period before the site was available for development, there was no rush to prepare a planning application; fundamental issues – such as the quantum and mix of development on the site – were far from resolved. What was consistent from the very outset of


the design process was the idea that there would be a retail core to the project. Initial proposals comprised retail and parking almost exclusively. With 13,000 car-parking spaces the initial ideas were a close match for Bluewater, which was under construction at the time. It was only over a long period that the project became increasingly mixed use and urban. The rationale for retail was a simple economic one – that there was a ‘gap’ in the provision of shops in East London, with disposable income generally heading to the West End or out of the city to car-based centres such as Lakeside. In phasing terms, retail was seen as the


economic engine that could support the huge costs of the early investment needed to pay


The masterplan The masterplan, as it evolved into its final form, comprised a series of urban districts tied together around an armature of pedestrian movement, linking the existing town centre north-westwards with Lea Valley Park through the existing station and new international station that bisected the site. A town-centre district in the south-east corner would extend the existing retail and leisure activities of the surrounding area. New offices – half the scale of Canary Wharf at the time – would sit to the west and north of the town centre and, as one moved further from the transportation centre of gravity, the northern and western edges of the site would predominantly be characterised by residential uses. In scale terms, built form would be at its greatest


height at the centre of the site, furthest from impacts on existing residents and responding to the transport connectivity of the international station. Dropping towards its edges ensured it would relate to – although not match – the generally low Victorian terraces of Leyton, located to the east. A network of streets and open spaces structured the plan, and the role of landscape to provide character and identity to the scheme was a central theme of the design process. A great deal of time was taken to debate the


configuration of the grid and the hierarchy of the street network. For a theoretical tabula rasa, the site had an astonishingly complex set of geometrical constraints, particularly those that were generated by railway boundaries. The conclusion was a hybrid of alignments that reflected the diagonal orientation of the routes north-west and south-west towards the park, and the water and the street grid of the surrounding area, overlaid by the pure east–west line of the international station 'box'. Within each part of the site, major open spaces


would be created as the urban focus for the surrounding districts, providing identity as well as address for the buildings that would be created.


Vision and process From the early stages, Chelsfield and Stanhope demonstrated a clear ambition that, as an urban environment, the Stratford City project would be plural in character, representing the input of many hands. Design charrettes were hosted at a masterplan scale and design studies undertaken at the scale of individual plots within the masterplan. Multiple architects were involved in reviewing, proposing and testing the scheme. In


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