Brownfield's first initiative

Citation

(1999), "Brownfield's first initiative", Property Management, Vol. 17 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/pm.1999.11317aab.023

Brownfield's first initiative

Brownfield's first initiative

Keywords Planning, Property development, Regional regeneration

The RIBA is launching a 30-minute video entitled Brownfields First, as part of its Brownfield's First Initiative. It is presented by Colin James, a former local authority architect, and now Chairman of West Oxfordshire District Council and Honorary Treasurer of the RIBA. The video is introduced by architect and Chair of the Urban Design Alliance, Terry Farrell. It was produced by Tony Chapman, who worked for the BBC for 20 years as a producer and director. It was shot on digital video format and is being offered to broadcasters at the BBC, ITN and Channel 4. Copies have been sent to national and local politicians ­ members of the All Party Group on Architecture and Planning and chairs of Planning Committees, to the key people involved in housing ­ developers and housing associations, and to all those with a particular interest in regeneration.

The video takes a series of examples from around England of developments on brownfield sites. These include four schemes which have won Housing Design Awards in the past two years: Urban Splash's development in Manchester; Smithfield Building, with architects Stephenson Bell; Homes for Change in Hulme, by Mills Beaumont Leavey Channon; Victoria Mill in Skipton, by Wales and Rawson; and Burton Mews in London, by Cantos Architects. Also featured are Urban Splash's own Britannia Mills, Manchester; Niall McLaughlin's Notting Hill flat; the Peabody Trust's Osram Court in Hammersmith, London, by architects Corstophine and Wright; and The Regeneration Practice's scheme in Hackney. Nottingham's Lace Market area is taken as a model of regeneration and a number of areas ripe for brownfield development also feature including: King's Cross, Paddington Basin, Brick Lane, several sites in the West Midlands and in Colin James's own backyard of Oxfordshire. The video does not shrink from addressing the thorny question ofgreenfield, even green-belt development. Recognising the need to avoid green-belt hopping, James looks at what is happening in Nailsea, near Bristol, and more controversially at Stevenage. Finally, the video includes sequences on the first two of English Partnership's flagship Millennium Villages, Greenwich and Allerton Bywater, near Leeds.

James talks to a number of people to elicit their views and to describe their schemes, including Jon Rouse, secretary to Lord Rogers' Urban Task Force; Ben Derbyshire, of Hunt Thompson Associates; Dickon Robinson, of the Peabody Trust; Paul Latham, of the Regeneration Practice; Charlie Baker, Homes for Change; Jonathan Falkingham, Urban Splash, and Terry Farrell.

As James says in conclusion: "We cannot force people to go where we want them to go. The task for architects, for planners, for developers, for politicians, is together to create the kinds of communities which people will want to go to. The present system is tortuous, uncertain and expensive ­ we owe it to the next generation to try to create a system that works in the wider interests of the whole community".

Copies of the video are available at £10 + VAT P&P ­ from the Press Office, and it was generously sponsored by GMW to mark its 50th anniversary.