38 PROJECT REPORT: RESIDENTIAL BUILDINGS
All the homes were designed and constructed offsite as closed timber panel systems
Looking back towards this expansive view – which includes Portsmouth’s Spinnaker tower – he explains that the team are not stopping here. The Ordnance Yard is in fact acting as the catalyst for a £30m joint venture between the developer and Portsmouth Naval Base Property Trust to regenerate the wider MoD site in Gosport. Elite Homes has an entire new peninsula in mind.
Acquisition
Planning permission was already granted here, in 2007, for the demolition of six shell filling rooms and the associated structure, plus the construction of nine new homes and the required access, parking and ancillary structures. This before work was abandoned by the site’s previous developer, however.
It was not the easiest site to pick up where they left off. The ‘mudlands’ the homes now reside upon are a Site of Special Scientific Interest, as well as a Special Protection area for birds, and a Wetland site of International Importance (under the International Convention on the Conservation of Wetlands) – to add to the long list of planning and logistical issues that come with both heritage and flood- prone projects.
It was in navigating these barriers that the JV were to embark upon the new community that’s now being created – and perhaps it’s through tackling its major challenges that the unique nature of this project was formed.
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Flood barrier
The houses are situated on a road covered in resin-bonded gravel, adjacent to an existing area of soft landscaping — a planted bank now separating the site from the water, and protecting the homes from flooding; increasingly crucial in the UK’s changing climate.
A thick concrete floodwall sits behind the planted bank, and extends across the frontage of all the homes. Even if the water did come over the top, says David, which would mean “the whole of Portsmouth would be flooded,” the planted banks would then act as swales, forming a further flood barrier. Flood planning has been intensively thought through as part of planning requirements necessitated by this location.
Achieving a flood-resilient design forced the designers to address a wide range of further issues, such as that certain rooms couldn’t be on the ground floor; “They could be a TV room for example, but not a bedroom.”
Ecology and access
Looking at the road behind the bank, David discusses some of the more difficult aspects of the project, beyond flood control into the many hurdles of building around listed features, and in an area that required “careful treatment of wildlife.” The team working closely with ecology agencies to relocate protected badgers and slow worms that had come to inhabit the dilapidated
ADF MARCH 2020
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