DMA

Our recently completed development at Parsons North is featured in today’s Architects’ Journal.

This mixed-use development for Westminster City Council not only provides 60 new homes, but it also restores a neighbourhood of streets and gardens to this corner of the Edgware Road. We’re particularly proud of how well it fits into the area, for the way it has repaired and reinvigorated the streets around the site with access, changes in level and landscaping and for the way it improves the relationship of Parsons House, the existing 20-storey residential tower, with its surroundings. It already looks as though it has always been there.

The challenge was to design a scheme that would sit well in what is a rapidly evolving streetscape, with its neighbouring schemes still in development. Our five-storey, U-shaped building wraps around a courtyard garden and, in doing so, restores the street facades and re-establishes the urban block. The scheme has been designed around existing mature trees and new landscaping helps to knit the neighbourhood together.

A variety of tenure types and differently sized flats and maisonettes provides 19 affordable homes of two and three bedrooms as well as 41 private sale homes ranging from one to three bedrooms. The larger, affordable duplexes have their own front doors onto Edgware Road where changes in level and landscaping are used to define the threshold between public and private, helping to activate the street and to prioritise family needs.

Parsons North could be described as the first piece of a ‘jigsaw puzzle of construction’ around Edgware Road and Church Street, slotting into and essentially unlocking the next phases of Westminster City Council’s regeneration plan for the area.