Welcome to the neighbourhood

Land use & place

Buildings & fabric

Homes

Catalytic conversations

Affordable living & community wealth

2.3 HUMAN NATURE’S CIRCLE OF IMPACT

Corporately, Human Nature works to a framework, designed to help lead to systemic and compound change for a sustainable future through actions taken at the neighbourhood-level. It is called the Circle of Impact. The framework comprises 12 levers of change, all of which are to be deployed at the Phoenix. For this application it can be seen to coincide with and complement the SDNPA list of attributes a development must have to meet its Ecosystem framing and requirements.

The Circle of Impact is also used as a tool to evaluate performance and impact. Does a scheme pull all 12 levers, how effectively, what happened, what changed, what impact occurred? What can we learn, how can action be made more effective over time in places, projects and enterprises?

Sustainable mobility Stewardship & services

Enterprise & creativity

1. ENERGY & INFRASTRUCTURE

Generating, importing, storing, distributing and managing renewable energy; creating a clean and potable water supply, sewage treatment, with circular resource management, all reducing the cost of living.

5. STEWARDSHIP & SERVICES

Facilitating professional, commercial and community enterprises that own, build, maintain, repair buildings and building fabric, gardens, streets, energy systems, co-mobility services, shared community spaces, local composting, waste collection, re-use and recycling.

2. BUILDINGS & FABRIC

Sourcing materials from our bioregion, ‘mining the Anthropocene’ (as architect Duncan Baker Brown has it) for salvage and reuse; use of regenerative and low impact materials, finding safe ways to use engineered and other timber; kickstarting local timber industries.

3. HOMES

Creating compact but beautifully proportioned and well lit, superinsulated homes. Using raw structure with occupant-led finishes; superefficient appliances; accessible roofs for gardening, food growing and ecology. Manual for ease of maintenance and repairs; shared storage, housing for bikes of all kinds, laundries, tools and common areas.

4. SUSTAINABLE MOBILITY

Encouraging walking and cycling as the primary means of movement, with safe, green streets, short blocks, inviting corners and excellent connectivity. Co-mobility services, including EV car club and hire, centralised parking and EV shuttle service.

6. ENTERPRISE & CREATIVITY

Providing multiple spaces for enterprise from home and co-working, studios, hybrid social spaces, makers spaces, events and meetings spaces. Local expertise in circularity and business support.

7. AFFORDABLE LIVING & COMMUNITY WEALTH

Creating mixed-income communities with more expensive homes to support the provision of affordable homes; different kinds of affordable tenures, institutional private rent, co-housing; shared spaces and facilities; community canteen; local food scheme; collective insurance, affordable energy, estate management; hiring and purhcasing locally.

8. CATALYTIC CONVERSATIONS

Engaging in conversations – from deep purpose to key themes –effective listening and deliberative processes, creating important agents of change. New ways emerge as opportunities, not constraints; finding ways to agree upon strategy and actions for exponential sustainability.

9. LAND USE & PLACE

Shaping urban structure and form through iterative and transdisciplinary design, marshalling streets, blocks, plots, roofscapes, townscapes and landscapes to create beautiful mixed-use, walkable neighbourhoods that will stand the test of time. Selection of land-use types to ensure mixed-use neighbourhoods and buildings and curating the choice of tenants in pursuit of Human Nature purposes.

10. BIOREGION & ECOSYSTEMS

Connecting optimised urban ecology to other ecologies; sourcing food from regenerative farms; low-carbon materials from the bioregion; cycling and going slower to better understand a place and its context, creating new habitats and encouraging biodiversity.

11. BEHAVIOUR & CULTURE

Encouraging and enabling people to live sustainably, creating Everyday Heroes who – as per climate scientist Peter Kalmus – inspire others to make positive changes, ultimately creating happier, healthier lifestyles and communities.

12. PUBLIC HEALTH & WELLBEING

Designing compact neighbourhoods that reduce social isolation, loneliness and depression; promoting walking and cycling; neighbourliness; healthy food sourcing; creating active living and fitness centres and trails and primary and complementary health and social care

2.4 LANDSCAPE-LED PLACE DESIGN

The proposals for the Phoenix have been established according to the tenets of a landscape-led approach to the design of place, defined as follows by the South Downs National Park Authority:

“Design, which is strongly informed by understanding the essential character of the site and its context (the landscape), creates development which speaks of its location, responds to local character and fits well into its environment. It needs to conserve and enhance the natural beauty, wildlife and cultural heritage of the area and create sustainable and successful places for people.”

Subsequent sections of this DAS describe how the team here has interpreted and addressed this approach in the precise situation of this blighted, semi-derelict, brownfield site with its myriad constraints and challenges but also unique and exciting opportunities.

We also address the relationship between landscape, identity and culture as defined in European Landscape Convention’s definition of landscape as “an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors”. Landscapes “as an essential component of people’s surroundings, an expression of the diversity of their shared cultural and natural heritage, and a foundation of their identity”.

The plans and designs here seek to demonstrate how the emergencies in climate and nature and the need for greater social cohesion and levelling up, inform, and sometimes obligate, necessarily new approaches to, among many other things, place, streets and public spaces, buildings, the housing offer, infrastructures, movement strategies and social, cultural and economic activities. These in turn will bring new and positive dynamics to relationship between people and landscape.

2.5 THE CHARACTER OF LEWES

It is important to recognise that the character of Lewes comes from being both a county town, with a High Street full of listed buildings – a number in Georgian appearance, many medieval structures that were fashionably refronted –and once a significant industrial town.

Before the mid-19th century a variety of industry, tanneries, sawmills, shipbuilding and ironwork were carried on this site for which the river offered transport. This was typical of such small towns with a rural hinterland. However, in the nineteenth century, as the use of coal and steam power enabled large scale industry, and railways to be developed (incidentally disrupting the carbon cycle of the planet) Lewes became untypically industrialised.

The Brooks Road Planning Brief from the SDNPA (October 2022) acknowledges this dual character of the town. This area has always looked very unlike the historic core of Lewes, identified in the Neighbourhood Plan by the Edwards map of 1799 (Appendix 4) but is nonetheless typical of Lewes and many of the foundry buildings are as old as much of the present conservation area.

Every’s Phoenix Works buildings

Every’s iron, and also later steel, works were the predominant industry of this site from the mid-century and buildings were one of the things they made. First in cast iron and later, as building techniques developed, in steel, including those for its own works. The floor foundry has a timber roof almost identical to Sussex barns such as the large barn at Standen, but the joints are cast iron, simplifying the building process. The high roofed building enclosed in the Foundry Workshop, is built by the same method as the floor foundry building. John Blackwell, Chair of the Sussex

Industrial Archaeology Society and the expert on the works, believes it may predate Every’s. It might be one of Edward Chatfield’s sawmills. Chatfield, best known in Lewes as a shipbuilder, most famously of The Wallands, would be the most likely provider of timber for both roofs. He and his ship have portraits in the Town Hall and Sarah Bayliss gives a full account of both in her book on the Town Hall pictures. The new plans come full circle there with modern laminated timber and metal joints.

The reuse of some of the surviving buildings or reuse materials of those not preserved recycled is also in the Every tradition. The third John Every, John Henry, renovated Bull House, for one well-known local example, which was adapted and provided with custom-made cast-iron work. The steel framed buildings of the Works were designed to be flexible, and their uses changed as the work changed. This flexibility is also true for the new plans. But more importantly the plans for this site offer an opportunity for a development that continues this tradition of innovation in building which now responds to the need for redressing the carbon balance which the heavy industry damaged.

Responding to the changing times

Every’s was of its time, as this new development is intended to be. Seeing Lewes becoming less important as an economic centre as economic life shifted in favour of the seaside towns, which railways would make easily accessible, Fiona Marsden, who has worked on the history of the family, has found that it seems John William, the second John Every, saw the opportunity to expand its work. They made not only the elaborate cast iron for the piers and promenades but the railways that brought visitors and began to establish the practice of commuting.

In the catalogues they produced in the early 1900s they note “structural work for railway companies is a speciality” and illustrate Lewes station, which is well marked on every column as Every’s and Moorgate. A particularly complete (though less well marked) example, of its work is to be found at Norwood Junction, and some parts of most other stations on the way to London and many other parts of the South East. Before the railways Lewes was very largely self-sufficient. This development responds also to the needs of the time, but the need now is to reduce the dependence on fossil fuels and return to more self-sufficient local communities. The railways remain, of course, now the lower carbon choice for travel powered by electricity.

The introduction to the catalogue describes the works as “equipped with the most modern improvements for the execution of first-class work expeditiously”. And “quotations will be furnished of the designs and specifications of engineers, architects, or public bodies, at the shortest notice [for] structural iron and steelwork”. Every’s moved into steel work as building techniques developed, and the catalogue illustrates the variety they offered. Edward Reeves, the long-established Lewes photographers, has images of some of these prefabricated buildings put together on the site. They are intended for town halls and markets as well as the workshops for which they offer its own as examples.

This flexibility is key to modern needs also and it is intended that the light engineering space in this development will continue this model of providing the engineering support that enables innovatory ideas to be realised.

Sources for Every’s engineering history

The records of Every’s seem to have been lost in the fire of 1948, but the foundry buildings themselves were not affected. We do not have Every’s order books. Reeves, however, does have its records; the digitisation of which is gradually revealing more of the history of 19th century Lewes. As they have been in business since before the present foundry buildings were built on North Street and did a great deal of work for Every’s, we have a good number of illustrations of the variety of its work as well as of its works buildings in use.

One example demonstrates the importance of some of the innovatory work done here and the way in which the history of this site is open to further research. Reeves has a photograph of a light railway carriage, simply marked in its books as ‘Mr Abbott’s car’. Abbott came from

Eastbourne and had developed a gearbox for a compact petrol engine with two speeds in each direction (no need for turning engines at the end of the line) which he first intended for trams. He came to Every’s to have a chassis built. A number of these trams were made in Lewes for use in Karachi (and can be found on the internet). The railway carriage in the Reeves photo was, however, for the South Indian Railway Company. Abbott’s company became Simplex and its history has been written, enabling the complete identification of the Reeves photo. The company went on to set up works in Bedford and made light rail engines used for ammunition trains in the First World War, not leaving a trail of steam being an obvious advantage. The prototypes, however, were Lewes made and it is the ambition here to maintain this tradition of responsive innovation in a lighter engineering form.

“We should not romanticise about the past or pretend that the notable architecture of Lewes is simply listed buildings: a castle and genteel Georgian facades. It is much more than that –including tall warehouses, industrial chimneys and narrow twittens with high walls. Life was hard for many Lewesians in centuries past, as evidenced by buildings – a workhouse for the poor, a mortuary at the biggest ironworks and two prisons.”

Sarah Bayliss

2.6 REFLECTIONS ON LANDSCAPE an essay

by Oliver Lowenstein

Human Nature endorses and supports the SDNPA’s core Landscape-Led Design approach to planning across the National Park, and expressly in relation to Lewes. Indeed, the Phoenix development seeks to embed the Authority’s design principles into the Phoenix design process and plan. At the same time Human Nature has been working to deepen the interpretation of landscape in this new place. This strategy is bolstered by an expanded taxonomy, encompassing the qualitative, the intangible and the invisible, while simultaneously anchored in the rigorous if evolving SDNPA Landscape-Led agenda.

Lived experience not rhetoric

Human societies, their cultures and their artefacts exist in time. In Lewes, with its multiple centuries of layered, cheek-by-jowl built fabric, this is strikingly evident, whether Georgian, Victorian, 20th century, each era stitches into the older tapestry of the town’s original medieval buildings, morphology and historic grain.

Animated by the myriad richness and diversity of this multi-layered historic environment the Temporal Landscape has become a touchstone for Human Nature’s Landscape-Led design. These multiple pasts and local provenance echo through the project. Local tree species, rammed chalk and flint are all part of the materials palette, all tributaries leading back to a living landscape embedded in ‘deep time’, across the ‘more than human’ ecological, geological, and geomorphological levels of planetary evolutionary shifts.

The presence of the past is both short and long-term: a single cycle of the seasons for crops like straw or hemp, the 50-100 years for a tree species to reach maturity, the reaching back 85 and 65 million years in geological time to the formation of flint or of chalk. They also reach into the future, changing, ageing and weathering, rather than masking the temporal in ‘monochromatic’ surfaces popular across the construction sector.

Buildings built from place bring another layer to experiencing the land. They invite consideration of the processes by which the land is formed. As such, they instance materially – and building materials individually – a larger geomorphological landscape point: human culture projects the visual and pictorial – the postcard view – onto the land. But ‘nature’, the organic engine of landscape, is in itself neither view nor postcard. What we experience as ‘nature,’ is dynamic – always in process, always in flux, ever changing, existing within deep time.

The Bio-ecological and the bioregional

Rather than imposing man-made designs and systems on natural environments, which these environments must then adapt to, Human Nature, mindful of the grain of bio-ecological systems, attempts – where possible – to work with and adapt to natural ecosystems. This bioregional ethos, understanding the culture of regions and places in relation to these regions bio-ecological health and integrity, underwrites a substantive part of the material basis of the Phoenix.

Not dissimilarly to the SDNPA’s adoption of an Ecosystems Services approach, Human Nature’s bioregional ethos seeks to strengthen the integrity of the region, its ecologies, its biodiversity, and that of its landscapes. Locally sourced building materials, nature-enhancing environments, productive roof farms and weaving local regenerative farms into the development are grounded in considerations of their role, impact in and health for the immediate and broader bioregional ecosystems. By foregrounding such place-sourced resilience and its potential regenerative ecological capacities the connective tissue between the source of the built fabric and materials to the ecological health of the land are rendered ecologically explicit.

Landscape is implicit in a built fabric where fabric and structure emerge from places and cultures and route back to the common layered sources; so that the earth used on the body of buildings, is the material source for the vessels we drink from, and the soil that feeds the growth of the plants we eat. This may not literally equate to growing buildings, but it does offer a materials agenda rooted