Little Lights Liverpool Baby Hospice

Status: 2023 – On going

Location: West Derby, Liverpool

Client: Little Lights Liverpool Baby Hospice

Design Team: BCA Landscape, MDG, Sutcliffe, PSA, Krol Corlett

BCA Landscape was commissioned in December 2023 by Little Lights Liverpool Baby Hospice, formerly known as Zoe’s Place Livepool, to design the outdoor areas associated with their new building, designed by Mersey Design Group.
Nestled within the West Derby conservation area, the site is surrounded by Grade II listed buildings, including the historic Casbah Coffee Club on Haymans Green, famously linked to the early days of The Beatles.
As Landscape Architects, our primary concern revolves around how new developments cater to client needs while seamlessly integrating into their surroundings, all without compromising the existing environment. To achieve this, four fundamental aspects have been addressed during the design process: character, sustainability, well being and community.
The essence of 19th-century Victorian garden aesthetics has been seamlessly integrated into the new landscape design, emphasizing elements such as axes, focal points, formal shapes, and symmetry.
These principles serve as the foundation of the proposed design.
The shape of the proposed building has been utilized to partition the landscape into five distinct areas with varied functions yet interconnected, creating a unified space if required.
While the formal grid dictated by the axes remains foundational, asymmetrical shapes and lines inspired by contemporary garden concepts have been layered over it. This infusion adds vibrancy and unpredictability to the landscape, encouraging exploration by users.aragraph

Grove Street

Status: 2019 – On going

Location: Liverpool, Grove Street

Client: The Regenda Group

Design Team: BCA Landscape, Metropolitan Workshop, shedkm, M&Y, Sutcliffe, Futureserv

The proposals sit within the Georgian Canning Conservation Area of Liverpool and responds positively and sensitively to this context and the surrounding urban grain.
The key points of the new development are:
– Mix tenure development with 304 new homes
– Walkable neighbourhood
– Suistainable design
– Preservation of the existing assets
– High quality external amenity provision

The landscape design has been developed in close conjunction with the architecture proposals and surrounding urban scale to ensure a co-ordinated vision, positive light penetration for landscape areas, wider street permeability and a long term vision for this urban community.
The scheme provides a positive safe home environment for existing and new residents and families – with external useable amenity space and opportunities for doorstep, street, shared semi-private courts and private garden use.
Public transport is close by, and we are creating improved connections through Vine Street and Falkner Street to existing pedestrian and cycle networks to access wider community facilities.

The ‘play on the way’ approach will be fully integrated in to the landscape spaces, some in the semi-private courts, some as door-step play for younger toddlers and some in the shared public central garden space. These garden spaces will have natural elements that help to encourage creative and ‘discovery’ play.

Liverpool Royal Hospital Gardens

Status: On going

Location: Liverpool

Client: Liverpool University Hospitals NHS, Foundation Trust (LUHFT)

Design Team: BCA Landscape, BAM Construction, Ellis Williams Architects, Sutcliffe Civil & Structural Engineers, HoareLea

The proposal aims to create an inclusive family friendly place with emphasis on creating a healthy environment that incorporates playful spaces within natural systems. Designed and scaled to human proportions, the landscape will offer a positive immersive environment, promoting relaxation, gentle exercise and social interaction.

The Design Vision creates opportunities for dwell spaces across the site defined by soft and flowing areas of interesting multi-sensory planting throughout the year. Whilst still allowing for key direct routes, we have created ‘eddy areas’ off to the side to encourage people to slow down and immerse themselves in nature. These cosier spaces are immersive, but not completely enclosed or secluded environments. Places where nature connection activities can be facilitated but also a series of small spaces where visitors/patients/staff can go to decompress.
Smaller spaces where people can sit in a ‘softer’ urban environment and absorb possible bad news or de-stress from a busy day etc. (The greater the biodiversity, the greater the human well-being benefits!) These positive nature-pockets near to the hospital buildings allow quick and easy access and are near to facilities for any structured outdoor hospital ‘recovery’ activities to be delivered.

The proposal creates family and child friendly spaces with sensory planting, using natural materials to create play opportunities (e.g. balance bars/willow tunnels, water play/sand play etc). The design incorporates shaded seating and picnic areas within a semi-private footprint. Bound by low hedging or open fencing, the space offers physical containment to protect young children from adjacent traffic without compromising passive supervision or overall site visibility. These ‘human-scaled’ immersive green spaces connect up to create nature corridors and a series of complimentary dwell spaces for visitors/patients and staff across the health campus.

Oldham

Status: Completed – 2025

Location: Oldham, Greater Manchester

Client: Oldham Metropolitan Borough Council

Design Team: BCA Landscape, EWA, Curtis, Ridge, Tilbury Douglas

The landmark restoration of the nearly 150-year-old Old Library is now complete, powerfully amplified by a transformative landscape scheme that forges a vibrant new Cultural Quarter for the borough.

The project goes beyond bricks and mortar, prioritizing the creation of a welcoming public realm that enriches the local environment.
The scheme introduces abundant new trees and sensory planting, complemented by subtle lighting design and the display of historically significant relics from across Oldham. With diverse seating options integrated throughout, the space is designed to be an inviting destination where residents can gather and linger.
Inclusivity sits at the heart of the development. Accessibility is paramount, with the installation of DDA-compliant ramps and enhanced pedestrian routes that seamlessly connect the building’s new facilities to the wider community.
A defining feature of the new landscape is the central, outdoor flexible events space. This open-air venue is designed to integrate directly with the building’s internal cultural life, providing a dedicated stage for performances and activities by the Oldham Theatre Workshop.

Council Leader Arooj Shah emphasized the emotional weight of the project:
“There’s projects that are really about instilling civic pride in people—letting people know that they are cared and thought about. Actually, bringing this building back into use, not just as the heart of democracy, but for all residents to use, is just incredible.”

The Old Library and its surrounding gardens mark a new chapter for Oldham, reinventing a historic treasure as a modern, accessible hub for culture and civic life.

Brett Gardens

Design Team: BCA Landscape, Ellis Williams Architects

The Brett Study Garden has recently opened at the Liverpool University Campus and includes 44 enclosed study carrells, each with a window into a shared green space.

This is one of the many environmental and spatial improvements we are helping implement across the wider campus. While there are more images and details to come, we would like to start by sharing some of the process and thinking that informed this new secret study garden.

 

To get the ball rolling we asked ourselves the question – what actually makes a place conducive to the process of studying. Covid made us look again at how and where we work and study. It focused our minds and bodies on the need for fresh air and emphasised the importance of a connection with nearby nature and the outdoors. It made us realise that the enclosed environment of our homes and workplace aren’t always beneficial for our health or productivity.  

With the exponential rise in distractions that our modern lives bring us, from social media notifications to a deluge of daily emails and back-to-back virtual meetings filling every hour, our need to find positive environments to work and study in becomes ever more vital.  

So, what is it about a window with a green view that makes us feel better? Over the last few years we have been delving deeper into understanding the psychological and physiological mechanics behind this phenomenon. It’s a fascinating world that includes touch, sound and smell, and not just sight. It involves ergonomics and proxemics (are we comfortable?) and it tracks back thousands of years to see how we are still adapting as a species to the very recent arrival of Cities! 

We have been using this fascinating research to develop our own understanding and in-turn inform our design for this amazing new Study Garden at Liverpool University’s Sydney Jones Library.  

We plan to collect further user feedback over the coming months and years to help understand the effects of planting growth and seasonal changes on the various qualities of the Study Garden, including the impact of artificial light in the darkening afternoons of the Autumn term. 

[Images: Day to night comparison – View of green space from Andy’s garden shed / home office]

Hythe

Design Team: BCA Landscape

The second completed development within the Four Bridges neighbourhood and on the recently completed Tower Road, Hythe is a Grade A office building with waterfront views that achieves BREAAM Excellent accreditation.

The landscape is designed to allow access to the dock edge whilst also integrating seamlessly with the Tower Road streetscape and provides facilities for a continually evolving transport network with a scalable, green-roofed cycle store included and a car park with electric vehicle charging points. The car park area is designed to double up as an events space that can be utilised either by the Hythe building or the adjacent and forthcoming Egerton Village.

Sustainable drainage (SuDS) have also been included to continue the work that has already been achieved on the Tower Road streetscape scheme with all surface water draining either into bio-retention beds or through permeable paving to infiltrate into the ground below. Any excess water during storm events is held and released at a sustainable rate into the dock, rather than the existing drainage network.

Native planting has been included in both the bio-retention beds and meadow areas to increase the site’s contribution to bio-diversity in the neighbourhood.

Greenwich Social Housing

Client: Greenwich Builds/ Royal Borough of Greenwich | Location: London | Size: 230 homes across 11 sites | Status: Batch 1A (16 homes) complete

Awards:  Winner – 2020 EG Property Award, Shortlisted – 2022 Housing Design Award, AJ Architecture Awards – Housing & AJ100

Project Team: Architects – ShedKM, Main Contractor – Elkins Construction Ltd

BCAL are appointed as Landscape Architects for this ground-breaking 100% affordable social housing scheme for Greenwich Builds. The first 11 sites involve over 200 homes, which are all being delivered as modular units, built off-site by Ideal Modular Homes, Mod Pods and Rollalong Ltd

BCAL have worked closely with the team to handle all aspects of the landscape elements of the scheme including representing landscape matters at public consultation, planning committees, design review panels, discharge of planning conditions, tender packages, construction/ as-built packages and site inspection.

Planning History:

The sites all individually respond to London Plan Policy H2: Small Sites and demonstrate how small, underutilised garage sites can be adapted to fulfil housing needs across London and beyond. The new homes all exceed the Nationally Described Space Standards and achieve a betterment to carbon neutral. The schemes were all approved at Planning Committee in Q1 2020.

The scheme in more detail:

The scheme provides for many of the families and individuals most in need of housing in the area and delivers significant improvements to the existing public realm with additional or improved space for play and recreation, for the benefit of new and existing residents alike. All homes are designed to achieve net zero and are built using volumetric modular offsite modern methods of manufacture and utilise timber frame construction.

A key aspiration was to challenge design stereotypes of socially rented housing, focusing on quality and generosity of inside space. Despite the constrained nature of the infill sites, homes have been designed with large, picture windows to maximise natural light. Living areas and bedrooms have been designed with views connecting to the gardens and communal outdoor areas. Window arrangements, tree planting and adjacencies to pavements strike a balance between individual privacy and connections to the street.

Designs maximise private amenity and play space, with front and rear private gardens, as well as new, improved landscaping and lighting. Improved public realm links the houses, which are set back from the main residential road. Materials have been used to create a fresh contemporary presence whilst being sensitive to the surrounding context.

At Strongbow Road, specialist foundation details allowed for the retention of two large mature Hornbeam trees to the front of the site giving a welcoming sense of place to the streetscape. At Bowness Close, privacy is provided with a mixture of gated brick walls to external spaces, trees to the front to screen views in and out and angled windows at first floor level. Pulteney Mews has been activated through a new planted pedestrian priority street, improving new connections with existing facilities in the local neighbourhood.

Tower Road

An intersecting traffic corridor dominated by high-speed vehicles and traffic lights has been transformed into a positive urban space, with a focus on a strong green identity and a sustainable drainage system. It provides new cohesive benchmark in a post-industrial derelict area that is undergoing a renaissance as part of the wider Wirral Waters masterplan. A busy road space located of the Wirral Docklands, has been narrowed down from a heavy traffic four-lane road to a calm two-lane green boulevard, with a strong focus on pedestrians and cyclists. A new sustainable urban drainage system filters and slows rainwater run-off from all surfaces into an interconnected system of tree trenches – ultimately creating a new landscape infrastructure that is future-proofed climate-resilient.

“The Creative Campus has been completed by this outstanding public space which links a series of otherwise disparate buildings across a serene and playful garden. It has been realised by an imaginative designer determined to deliver on the vision. Built to an exceptional standard of finish, it is a soft and welcome delight in an otherwise harsh urban setting. A place you will want to return to again and again.”

Garden of Reflection

Year of completion: 2013

Client: The Palace Trust

Project Team: BCA Landscape

Situated within the grounds of the Bishop’s Palace, the Garden of Reflection offers visitors of the grounds a further variation in textural, emotional and even spiritual experience.

As part of the wider re-invention of the Bishop’s Palace in Wells as a self-sustaining visitor attraction, the Garden of Reflection is the final piece in the jigsaw.

From the very start of the project the Bishop has had the intention that the
Garden of Reflection should be somewhere that can offer visitors a meditative
experience in a contemporary setting, differing from the other traditional
reflective spaces on offer in both the Palace grounds and the neighbouring
Cathedral.

The creation of a journey of discovery designed to at first heighten the senses
in the colour garden and then gradually strip away stimuli until true meditative contemplation can be approached in the calm central wooded glade.