St William of the Berkeley Group can claim to be a pioneer of this approach, carefully designing its homes and apartment buildings around existing physical features, creating a landscape that works for its location and the people who will live there.
Alison Dowsett, the managing director of St William explains: “It’s a simple idea – leading with landscape design, making that part of the process from the outset. Yet that’s a unique position. What we’re doing is to landscape the spaces we have and only then see how best buildings might fit into that.
Very often the way developers work is the other way around, which doesn’t always use the land to its best potential. You end up with spaces that feel left over.”
This landscape-led approach is being taken across St William’s future portfolio, with 33 brownfield sites comprising 17,000 homes planned across London and the South East over the next 15 years.
Dowsett adds: “There’s a huge demand for affordable housing in London. We want locals to be able to buy, but also want to encourage people to these locations from further afield. We’ll be creating entire new villages and new communities, so we need to get it right.”
Work is being done across a diverse range of London boroughs and areas, including premium properties in Fulham, Highbury, and Battersea, and more affordable developments in Beckton, Taplow, and Borehamwood.
Each site offers its own unique challenges and demands, from listed buildings to important industrial artefacts and structures. Preserving history has to be balanced with the need for more homes, with the result that each development is unique and characterful in its own way, allowing what’s already there to dictate the landscape and inspire the architecture.
This approach has the added benefit of making designers and architects think about the spaces and buildings at a very human level – how people live in and move through the spaces. In the past, new housing developments have sometimes tended towards the monumental statement or the grand ideal, with little thought for actual day-to-day life.
Key to the approach is the understanding of the way people move through spaces, informing the placement of doorways and even the width of paths, providing space at natural resting places without blocking thoroughfares.
Dowsett reveals that smaller building footprints are favoured over monolithic structures, allowing for more intimate outdoor spaces rather than vast parks, and even the passage of the sun is taken into consideration to anticipate where shadows will fall.
She says: “Taking a landscape-first approach is essentially all about creating a sense of place. That’s what people feel most comfortable with, and safest in; it’s what they gravitate to.
All too often, developments focus on the material side of things such as what the development is made of, rather than how it feels, what it’s like to live in, or what is likely to happen day to day in the space that’s created.”
The renowned Danish architect Jan Gehl, a key inspiration for St William, neatly summarised this philosophy:
“First life, then spaces, then buildings.”
It’s easy for all this to start sounding like another lofty ideal, but there are plenty of practical benefits to the development process. Building projects always come with challenges like drainage and topography, but with landscaping-first plan they are addressed right at the start, rather than becoming something to deal with after completion.
Most people would agree that creating pleasant and enjoyable living spaces is clearly a good thing to do, but the benefits are purely anecdotal.
Dowsett wants to take a more scientific approach by actually commissioning independent research to not only confirm the commercial viability, but also show that the approach increased the wellbeing of residents.
Whatever the outcome, the benefits are clearly there; St William’s first development, Prince of Wales Drive in Battersea, completely sold its first two apartment buildings within six months.
