Living over the shop Lecture by Peter Redman - Chief Executive, Notting Hill Housing Trust, given at the Design for Homes Intensive Flair conference, June 2001. 30 mins CPD. I wanted first to apologise to you Chairman in that I am going to criticise other people's schemes, give some lessons from other people's schemes. All too often people take that as criticism. So the fairest thing to do is to pick schemes which were closely linked to people here so that they can come back at me. That is justice, isn't it? You will see which they are in a moment. I'm going to talk about living over the shop but first I will tell a story about a little part of north west London, a mixed use area next to Portobello Road where Notting Hill Housing Trust's first office was located. It was a pretty rundown street some years ago. The police had closed the pub for criminal activities. Staff were frightened to witness prostitution and drug dealing in broad daylight outside their office. Not many people wanted to live in this street. What businesses there were were struggling and most properties were being boarded up. It was quite a vibrant area in other ways, with floats for the Notting Hill Carnival assembled in the street and made ready and huge costumes were put around people to move into the parade. So it perhaps had some life in it. My predecessors took a decision that we were going to take control of this street. So steadily over a period of years we bought up half of it, half of the shops, half of about 50 commercial premises, half of some 70 residential dwellings. The story really is in contrast to some of the things we have heard already today, but there are some very powerful common threads. First of all, we started with the housing. We didn't come in for the arts, or the business or the private sector money; we started with the social housing. We started modernising and refurbishing the dwellings, a small number of the dwellings. We took an eyesore building. We took that pub and turned it into starter workshop units and got a bit of sense into the place that something was possible. That encouraged people to say that they wanted to live there; not families, as you can imagine; retired people, young people, young couples, people who found the cosmopolitan nature of the Notting Hill area of north west London attractive to them. people sustained for that long - we were able to do all sorts of things. We persuaded the political framework that the leadership of the local police force was inappropriate for that street and adjoining neighbourhood. The idea that knowing where the drugs were being dealt made them comfortable was not acceptable and so there was a change in the leadership of the local police and the drugs scene started to be controlled, brought down to a level where it is almost non-existent now. We cannot say it has gone. So that concept of local people taking control and having some influence is a very, very powerful one for us. All through our organisation we have this feedback mechanism of what works, what doesn't, of communication, participation, board members, a third of whom are residents of our schemes, were able to say, "Come on, this needs to be done, this is in our interests to get this right." Not only were local people influencing political power, but they were watching what was happening. From their presence at close to street level, not necessarily the beautiful views from the high towers but close to street level were able to influence through having confidence that it was worth contacting the police or the local authority to get something shifted. Things began to move and we did up more of the houses. We took on more shops. We started modernising them. We now have one of the most wealthy patches of real estate in north Kensington (1). So much so that we are now gradually selling a shop a workshop space, taking the gain - and these are huge percentage figures over admittedly quite a number of years, but the return would make most people's eyes water - and using that money that we have made in our not-forprofit context to go and regenerate other areas, to tackle the rundown shopping and housing in other parts of north west London. There is a business Their presence became very powerful in two ways. First of all, by organising with them -and this was our role as agent for change - to help them take more control of what was happening around them. We were able, over a period of months and in some cases nearly two to three years - and that takes a lot of motivation, energy and encouragement to keep 1 1
prospect here that works extremely well, to say nothing of the social gain. So that street level involvement is one of the themes I wanted to take through with this idea of living above the shop. I think about 2.5 billion is the value of our property portfolio. We have a development programme about one-third of a billion, which is the biggest substantial activity. We add two streets a month to the London street directory streets per month. We are into streets, we are into ordinary terraces, we are into connecting our streets. We are into streets which are mixed tenure as well and we have had a lot of experience of that which we will see in a moment. That combination of being effective at local level and working with local people has given us an enormous amount of confidence and indeed an enormous amount of spending power and attracting very good talent in making change. We have become one of the major players in the intermediate market. Key working housing for us is much more than the public sector worker. This is about people on moderate incomes trying to live in central and west London. One scheme you will see in a moment is one where the technician who is working here today will be moving into. You can imagine the juxtaposition between the cost of living in central London on the open market and the kind of income perhaps the technician here is earning. You begin to understand the dilemma we have in London to make the city really work. beginning to wonder just what are we doing with our space. Because here we have something approaching a hectare of flat roof surrounded by just over a hectare of car parking in an area just south of Kew, the London Borough of Richmond (2). Not a bad frontage to the shed but not an especially welcoming or encouraging use of space. For me the big problem is how we get this mix right, the big parking lot, the big shed, the supermarket and the social housing estate. Perhaps put like that it is pretty obvious that we are dealing with a mix that is probably not quite right. I want to show some examples where I think people have made an attempt, and it is something to learn from then show you one I am proud of where I think we are getting it right. In the 1970s, 25 years ago - Nicky Gavron, I think, was chair of the planning committee at the time Haringey Borough Council, encouraged with local authority powers, undertook a major revamp of the retail and commercial centre of Wood Green High Street. In a lot of ways it worked, and foot traffic is very high here. It is a very dense operation. I think most of the shopping is successful in the area. But what we have is some 7 hectares of floorspace of which something like two and a half are parking and access roads. You can see some of the multistorey car park in front of you, office blocks and housing there in the middle, up in the sky (3, 4). 3 2 Let me move on to pose some of the other problems of living over the shop. I start with a shed, a not unattractive shed. We are getting better at this, myself and others involved in building for the supermarkets. We have rather too many oversized buildings with large pantiled roofs and brick work and brick colourings which seem to have more Es in them than the food that we get off the shelves, that we have turned into tar dies that go into some of the roofing slates we see these days. They bring with them a colour, the mass of some of these buildings bring with them a form but many of us are 4 2
I think a number of dilemmas appear in that to me. One is the sheer fact of life that the ceiling heights needed for car parking, office space and housing are different and certainly for the large supermarket wanting quite high ceilings. Already you have a design problem that is very hard to fix. What happened here, of course, it was jumbled up, it was put together in its different elements in a bit of a basket and jumbled together. I feel slightly saddened by the degree to which the architects Sheppard Robson and Metropolitan Housing Trust ended up with a housing element which was rather sort of sad, poor sister, of the whole thing: only some 15% of the whole floor area. The housing is not special but it is in demand. But its popularity, as you can imagine, is not high. It is windswept, it is abysmal to access. The internal space plan is actually pretty good but there are a whole host of issues that I won't go into detail about, which actually make it quite hard work to manage and to be a success. If you are really going for mixed use and you include only 10-15% of one element are you really mixing or are you just dabbling? I think we have many large blocks of housing in our inner city, the Edwardian mansion block, for example, which has 10-15% of shopping at street level, often backing right into the full depth of the building like a courtyard with other facilities in the centre, a relatively small amount of retail in what is predominantly a successful housing form. Here we have the reverse with 15% of housing stuck on top of a very large, retail commercial building. Interestingly, Countryside published something recently, or the news was given recently, about some development in Manchester. Mixed Use, it is titled. Only 5% of it is retail, 10% is office, 85% is housing. I am sure the housing will be fine but is this really what we are driving for in trying to mix uses? Dickon Robinson and I have chatted about this scheme a number of times, Peabody in Hammersmith at the old Osram factory (5). The borough of Hammersmith and Fulham felt the tower, some 3.5 metres square, was worth listing. It has some attractive features. It has been a landmark for a long time. But here I think Tesco and Peabody and their architect did try to grapple with something we don't see much elsewhere. The built floorspace for both uses here are about the same, about 50:50 retail and housing. So good on them in having a go. But somehow I feel the constraints there, rather dark under the arches, the access to the site is where the lorries and the bins are and the access to the housing is up this tower, which has some nice features but it is a little lonely. I sometimes wonder whether listing that tower is something which really is not as beneficial as possible. 6 The housing on the top (6) has extremely high demand and the local authority pushed through, with some resistance on Tesco's part at the time, 100 dwellings on top of the supermarket. The local authority was desperate for the accommodation, with families in bed and breakfast hostels, and all 100 of these dwellings went to homeless families moving out of temporary accommodation. It is a bit edgy. It feels a bit like being on a cross channel ferry, not because it is moving around but because it is that busy. There is nowhere you can hide. Some of it is a bit too in your face. Frankly, if it wasn't for one feature this would be a disaster. The feature, which I congratulate Peabody for, is the onsite manager. There's this estate worker, who is there all the time and he has respect for all ages and holds the show together. That is a remarkable feature but it is a fragile proposition. 5 3
immediately put responsibility on the two parties and it did not take very long for us to recognise the qualities of Tesco and their architects, and for them to recognise that we knew something about housing, about the streets about mixing the tenure and about making neighbourhoods that worked. We really saw the professionalism of each other's contribution. Then we got down to some risk analysis about this building and of course imagine the dimensions and the complex set of dynamics in getting something like this to work. 7 I will mention three. The first was the barrier between the housing and the shopping. You see from this shot we have tried to get the housing down to the street level, not just on the rooftop of a supermarket. We are fortunate that the road to the left rises away so that we can actually get some access points in at different levels as well. But what would happen if something went wrong and channelled drainage from the housing through the ceiling of the supermarket? 8 We did some sums together and it was earthshattering to work out what the loss of two aisles for two weeks means in revenue terms. These are very, very large numbers. So our risk analysis led us to get the creative people together to say what we could do about this one structure on top of another, because they were indeed two different structures that created a barrier.there were some very innovative ideas about waterproof membranes and flexibility to get this stack of housing over the supermarket to work well. 9 Moving on to Notting Hill. This is Tesco's at the junction of Warwick Road and Cromwell Road and tells its own story in a lot of ways (7, 8, 9). First of all, I give credit to the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, not just for a fairly firm hand in their view of what planning gain should be about. They told Tesco to work with Notting Hill, Notting Hill to work with Tesco's and to get on with it, come back with a scheme that they can approve. That That led to the second big analysis, which was how to make it look as if this was really one structure. We went all round Europe looking for some way that we could do this. What you see is three millimetres of synthetic render on the building frame but which can move something like 200 millimetres without any defect at all to the housing. The third objective was to have easy access into the housing, into the courtyard, into something that has proved immensely popular. We have created in this courtyard an extended environment, partly for sale and partly for rent. It is not immediately clear which is which, and that is exactly as we intended. We have learned a lot about mixed tenure, about building schemes, which we will have to sell and which we will take to rent. We moved as the market moves in the locality to get the divide we'd like. If you can apply these concepts successfully with the technical developments of a large shop in the city centre, then we really are beginning to make mixed schemes worthwhile rather than just thinking about the small scale shopping in the mansion block. 4
I was pleased to see last year in the Housing Design awards Levitt Bernstein's building in Pimlico (10). A mansion block of a kind but I think it was quite interesting mixed matches of verticals and horizontals in there, giving it quite a lively sense. So living over the shop for me it two things really. It is on the grand scale, and by that I mean the huge body of small scale regeneration, mix of uses at street level, and the large scale which you can see we really need the very best of skills to make something that complex into something that really works and achieve the landmarks that we need in so many parts of town. 10 I just wanted to end finally with one shot which right near where I live. Here we have a rather modest development of six flats over an estate agents (11). I think it is rather a nice example of a bookend to an Edwardian Terrace of housing and shops below, making that transition from what is the shopping High Street in Teddington to the residential areas adjoining it. To me that is the detailed fabric of our city centre. 11 5