North Bank East

Design Team: BCA Landscape, ShedKM, Urban Splash

Awards: Shortlisted for the Housing Design Awards 2021

Year of completion: 2016 – ongoing

Northbank is a mixed typology and tenure residential-led quarter, with local community uses, offering a bespoke, more tranquil living environment. A quarter offering city living with ‘space to breathe’, ‘off the beaten track’, with access to the waters-edge and a short walk away from other quarters and world destinations.

A new waterside residential quarter featuring 347 pioneering, modern, modular homes is coming to Wirral Waters. Urban Splash developers and architects Shed KM are bringing their factory-built modular home HOUSE to Merseyside for the first time.

BCAL have designed and delivered advanced landscape infrastructure works, including a new adoptable cycleway and street tree planting along the Dock Road. They have also designed and submitted for planning a design vision for a new Community Park and additional Dockside landscape works to compliment a series of new phased residential developments along the Northbank East Float.

“Working in this joint venture with House by Urban Splash we will transform East Float into a contemporary waterside community for anyone looking to make Wirral Waters their home. Together with the new public realm, that includes new pocket parks and dockside walkways, these innovative new homes from Urban Splash will help create a new exciting, diverse and healthy community.” – Richard Mawdlsey
Director of Development for Peel L&P’s Wirral Waters

St. Mary’s Quarter, Elephant Park, London

Budget: £4.7m (across multiple phases)

Project Team: BCA Landscape, John McAslam, AFL, Squire + Partners, Axis, Robert bird Group, TUV-SUD, AKT, URS, DP9

Lend Lease’s ‘One The Elephant’ (OTE) scheme was the first phase of ‘Elephant Park’ the UK’s first Climate Positive Development, providing 3,000 homes, 1,200 new trees and an energy hub giving net zero carbon heat and hot water to all homes.

OTE then became the first phase of the St Mary’s Quarter project for Southwark Council, which expanded to include the re-modelling of St Mary’s Park and the adjacent ‘Uncle’ PRS scheme in Newington Butts for developers Realstar, together with The Castle Leisure Centre and Southwark Playhouse Theatre.

The resulting integrated new public realm project across a variety of public and private areas in various ownerships, provided an extensive new and improved green infrastructure which included green walls (irrigated from water harvested in blue roof areas), jet plazas and mirror pool water features, balancing pond (fed by recycled surface water), a major new play area and a number of semi-private roof gardens including allotments for the new residential developments.

BCAL worked closely with the Architects (Squire and Partners, John Mc Aslan, Space +Place, and Axis/Sheppard Robson), the Southwark Borough engineers and TFL to craft a carefully coordinated pedestrian and cyclist friendly public realm which largely excludes vehicles and provides a major boost to the health and well-being of local residents.

New play areas, fountains, ponds, mirror pools, roof gardens, blue roof – SUDS system, green wall and extensive public seating are provided under groves of mature pine trees.

Blackhorse Mills, Walthamstow London

Budget: £3.3m

Project Team: BCA Landscape, ASSAEL

Blackhorse Mills is L&G’s flagship Build-to-Rent scheme of 479 new homes on the edge of the SSSI Walthamstow Wetlands. 1 Hectare of public realm and extensive private amenity on roof gardens, terraces, podiums and balconies with amazing views over the Lee Valley make this PRS scheme an extremely desirable place to live and visit.

Facilities include a heated swimming pool, tennis and shuffle-board courts, outdoor barbecue, children’s play area, 197 new trees and extensive new habitats all set in a virtually car –free, pet-friendly development.

BCAL have been involved from inception to completion, working closely with L&G, Architects Assael and Interior Designers Lister + lister.

“The design team has consolidated our brief into a development which meets the demands of today’s aspirationals, who are renting the whole building, the grounds, the service and the lifestyle- not just their apartment- and opens up the wetlands for the benefit of residents and the wider public” – Dan Batterton, Fund manager, BTR Legal & General

Face of Liverpool

Budget: £1m

Design Team: BCA Landscape, Broadbent Studio, Smiling Wolf

Awards: Best National Community Campaign 2006 – Presidents Grand Prix Award, NWDA Renew – Exemplar Project Status 2004

A fast-track mixed-use scheme at the gateway to Liverpool’s Central Business District. Part urban landscape, part public artwork, the £1.4m project includes ‘The Face of Liverpool’ – a wonderful installation that gave Liverpool residents the chance to have their portrait set into the scheme’s structure and help celebrate the city’s rich ethnic and cultural diversity.

The Landscape includes a twelve metre cor-ten wall and giant hardwood timber ring, alongside precast concrete walls with inlaid glass illustrations and stainless steel strips. Notions of global migration, sea-faring communications and trade-links underpin the visual identity and graphic language of the scheme.

The morse code wall, by the way, spells out “Permission to come alongside”

“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.” – RIBA Judge