3 PLANNING & DESIGN PROCESS

“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.”

Major developments such as the Phoenix, especially on scarce and precious brownfield sites such as this, have a new obligation to go well beyond mainstream real estate. In addition to housing people well, celebrating their landscape context in its widest sense and avoiding what Secretary of State, Michael Gove, refers to as ‘insipid’ designs lacking ‘heart and soul’, they must become crucibles for new forms of housing, public space, urban landscapes, energy and mobility systems and, critically also for shared community resources and shared living.

A place at the scale of the Phoenix is a system comprising many complementary elements. The integration of these elements through meticulous evidence-gathering, principled design, consultation and testing by skilled, close-knit multidisciplinary professional teams, informed the eventual sum of the parts in which serendipitous wins sit alongside the inevitable compromises.

3.1 DESIGN PROCESS: THE EVIDENCE OF THE LAND, NEW FORMS & NEW STRATEGIES

The approach taken to the planning and design of the Phoenix is summarised in the diagram overleaf.

Even this rather complex-looking diagram is an oversimplification of the constant iteration between all of the different factors, many of them interdependent, in play on a project of this type and scale. Each has had to be taken into account, appraised and ultimately decided upon; despite best efforts this process does not work in a tidy, linear way but is iterative. Needless to say, a plan that can work for the Phoenix is not drawn from a simple pattern book. It responds very directly to what some call the ‘evidence of the land’ as we find it today and how the natural, cultivated and built landscapes might be enhanced as we act to respond to pressing global, national and immediate local challenges and opportunities.

“Our sensory landscape is shrinking precisely at the moment when it should be broadening… (it is not) a lifeless, detached being, in fact it is a sensory, emotional, lived experience…more than hardware. How often do strategic urban plans start with words like ‘beauty’, ‘love’, ‘happiness’ or ‘excitement’?

Charles Landry

3.2 PLANNING & DESIGN PROCESS: OVERVIEW HOUSING, ECONOMIC VIABILITY & DELIVERY

Net Zero strategy

Build Back Greener 2021

Levelling Up the UK 2022

Purpose & policy

Evidence

Uk Government

Policies

Priorities

SDNPA

Purpose

Duties

Policies

Design Guidance

Human Nature

Values

Mission

Design Principles & Concepts

Methodologies

Blueprints

Big Moves

Precedent Studies

Cicle of Impact

• Santon planning consent

Economic viability

Landscape setting & history

• Site conditions

Principal site constraints

Lewes & District movements patterns & modes

• Total carbon footprint

Site ecology

• Flood risk now and for 200 years

Housing need & demand

Edge conditions

• Social, cultural & economic conditions and opportunities

LANDSCAPE-LED PLACE DESIGN

COP 26&27

Climate change 2021 / 2022

The South Downs National Park Landscape-led Design Flow Chart, shown left, illustrates how an evidence led design process might look.

The diagram below builds upon this, making reference to specific policy documents and context, and combining this with Human Nature’s considered approach to design.

Levelling Up & Regeneration Bill 2022

Phoenix Vision Plans, Designs & Strategies

Community consultation

Analysis, framework masterplanning scenarios & evaluation

Access & connectivity

• Key views

Street hierarchy

Block typologies and housing choice

• Heritage issues

Embodied carbon & site memories

Flood strategy: fluvial & pluvial

• Precedent studies

Shared living

• Open & green space

Optimising urban ecology

Movement & parking strategies

• Quantum & siting of community & commercial uses

September 2021 Design Festival & workshops

Community consultation

Masterplan & design concepts & studies, technical evaluation, review & iteration

Big design moves

• Block studies

Having mix & choice

Shared space & shared resources

• Landscape typologies

LVIA studies

• Sustainability strategy

Materials & embodied carbon

Economic modelling

• Highways impacts

Environmental Statement WIP

Design coding for quality & landscapecontext, detailed design for Parcel 1 homes & landscape

Community consultation

3.3 THE PROFESSIONAL TEAM

A bespoke team was assembled for the Phoenix

Thirteen renowned architects were selected: Mae, Mole, Al-Jawad Pike, Rabble, Adam Richards Architects, Architecture Ensemble, Ash Sakula, Material Cultures, Charles Holland, Archio, Persicope, Arup and Human Nature’s design team. The aim was to bring vivacity, character, layers of expression and texture to the form and fabric of blocks and buildings. The architects brought their wideranging experience of work at different scales and in different contexts to masterplanning proportionately so for a town as rich in character and identity as Lewes.

Kathryn Firth, Masterplanning and Urban Design Director at global practice Arup and Dan Rea, Principal at Periscope, have studied, drawn, modelled, advised, briefed, integrated, debated, presented over and over again throughout the process and cohered the ingredients of these plans into an interlinked and indeed indivisible whole turning the myriad site constraints into opportunities for a wonderful new place.

Urban Movement – who know the street network and traffic flows of Lewes intimately –worked on connectivity and street structure and alongside engineers and sustainable transport experts at WSP, created the mobility strategy.

Landscape and Visual Impact (LVIA) teams from both Terra Firma and Preconstruct have steered the masterplan to help ensure that future views both of and from the Phoenix celebrate its glorious situation in Lewes, the Ouse valley and Downland setting.

Ecology Solutions has studied existing habitats and wildlife and advised on how to maximise appropriate diversity here through the urban and riverine ecology of this regenerated place. Periscope (leader of the external design team here) has worked diligently to weave this into a fine mosaic of greenery. Their designs for community gardens, urban farming, green roofs, large-scale rain gardens and smaller SUDS features, proposals for witness trees and other tree planting, grace this plan making it a new type of super-greened urbanity.

Experienced flood and civil engineers Expedition has modelled multiple scenarios (settling on the one described in this plan) for how to keep future residents of the Phoenix and neighbours on the Pells safe from both fluvial and pluvial flooding: a strong flood wall and a patchwork of ingenious, large-scale rain gardens are proposed in consultation with the Environment Agency and County. In addition, Expedition has investigated ground conditions, the resilience of key existing structures, and the pathways of extant sewage and other infrastructures and those for the new infrastructure to follow. Their work on the flood wall with Periscope led to the proposals for an elegant elevated footway with a Belvedere with a garden as its centrepiece by the new bridge. This connects to a fine, continuous riverside walk that in due course will connect the meadows beyond the Pells to Cliffe to the south.

Eminent local architect and sustainability activist, Duncan Baker Brown (BBMArchitects), has contributed a paper on ‘Mining the Anthropocene’ with extensive guidance on why and how to reuse and repurpose the myriad existing materials on site. This work has been taken forward by Human Nature’s own sustainable construction unit together with specialists Local Works Studio which has conducted a detailed audit and are introducing a supply chain of reconstituted construction materials.

Paul Myles who, among many other things, was the last apprentice to the Phoenix ironworks, has proposed a Thomas Paine bridge across the Ouse, deploying inspiration form Paine’s own bridge specification, collaborating with Clothilde Robin and Chris Wise of Expedition to design with redundant steels from the site in a bravura piece of engineering.

Atelier Ten, arguably the world’s leading environmental engineers, most famous perhaps for their pioneering work on the Gardens By the Bay in Singapore and the Yale School of Forestry, has specified the renewable energy system for Phoenix and advised on building fabric specifications to optimise natural cooling and warmth. The new grid will supply affordable clean energy for future residents, businesses and community users at a discount to the prevailing market price. Additionally, Atelier Ten has worked with the architects to recommend and specify shutters and doubleaspect apartment design for building comfort and delight.

Oliver Lowenstein, Stephen Johnson and Dave Saunders and the team at Flimwell, modular architects TDO, specialist timber engineers and contractors, EUrban and Kelly Harrison at Whitby Wood, working with support from expert timber system and designers Greencore and world-class forestry behemoth Stora Enso from Finland has provided blueprints and consequent design advice for mass-engineered timber structural solutions. These solutions will allow the Phoenix to be built with natural materials in a carbon-regenerative way, costeffectively with speedy delivery, safely, with minimal traffic disruption and zero waste.

Cost consultancy, RUA , has steered the economics of the project; they also provide project management support and systematic cost advice for the overall scheme appraisal and Parcel 1 housing. Teams at CBRE have worked on viability and cash flows. Local agents Rupert Coles and Freddie Dryden have advised on valuations and Marshall Regen has studied and reported on the upside economic impacts of the proposals identifying 500 jobs in construction and 381 permanent jobs once the Phoenix is completed.

Human Nature lawyers Addleshaw Goddard and Trowers & Hamlins have advised on land, corporate structures, affordable housing, investment and governance and stewardship. Whaleback Planning , with its intimate knowledge of the South Downs and experience in the Park Authority has been invaluable with its insights and steers and professional work on the planning application, the ES and S106. Oliver Jessop has been a rigorous and expert voice on heritage.

The team of planners, modellers and analysts, development strategists, sustainable construction specialists and project managers, at Human Nature, many of whom hail from or live in Lewes and the Downs, have led the briefing, research, Blueprint thematic exercise, politics, community consultations, site management, legal, viability and development planning work. The growing in-house design team has coordinated with the large external design team and will provide invaluable continuity as the scheme moves into detailed design and delivery.

We would like to thank architects Ash Sakula for their excellent work on the detailed design for the first homes to be built on site (please see last section of the DAS and its companion the Detailed application).

“To do great things, to really learn, you can’t shout suggestions from the rooftop then move on while someone else does the work. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to care about every step, lovingly craft every detail. You have to be there when it falls apart so you can put it back together again”

Tony Fadell

We are deeply grateful to the people of Lewes for attending design festivals, exhibitions and events, giving generously of their time, knowledge and skills and for shaping these plans and designs. The spirit of constructive activism, civic engagement and irreverence and independence, lives on.

And we thank the members and executive teams at the SDNPA for their guidance on this application and their stewardship of our precious and beautiful landscape, and of course friends and colleagues at Town, District and County level for their ambition and enthusiastic engagement.

Core

Architects

Technical consultants

Human

P laces Ltd client, m asterplanning, architect

M ateria l Culture s architect

RUA cost consultant

Architectur e Ensembl e timber construction & architect

A-Squared ground investigations

BakerBrown circular economy & architect

CBRE valuatio n Expedition engineers

Atelier Ten e nvironmental engineer s

Ecology Solutions ecolog y

O liver Lowenstein innovation

Whitby Wood executive e ngineer s

WS P h ighways/ transport

3.4 PREPARATORY WORK

Phoenix Blueprint

While in negotiation and due diligence to secure the land for the Phoenix during 2020, the research and design team at Human Nature was tasked with identifying a suite of key themes that might be combined into a background brief for the external professional architectural, landscape and urban design professionals working on the plans.

The result of this work was the Phoenix Blueprint. The 20 themes were identified in relation to place, design and experiential concepts to shape the thinking of the wider design team. To bring each theme to life precedent studies were conducted with images and sometimes data gathered to illustrate and otherwise concretise the ideas.

This work was set alongside contextual/ landscape and other studies, copies of all of the relevant plans and evidence brought together for the previous planning application, and set alongside written guidance as to SDNPA and other public policy and priorities compiled by planning consultants Whaleback.

An two-day workshop was held in March 2021 with the full professional team to provide the inspiration, policy guidance and other strategic steers leading to an initial high-level brief on some of the issues the plan would face. After discussion, this in turn became an initial ‘points of focus’ document for the next tranche of studies by the teams.

A Town Called Zero

A paper by eminent local architectural writer and thinker Oliver Lowenstein was commissioned to sit alongside the Blueprint and contextual studies. Oliver is publisher, editor and primary writer of the Fourth Door Review, a convener of Lewes Makers, a specialist in and proponent of timber buildings, bioregionalism and also a member of the Design Review community of the National Park.

Human Nature asked Oliver to think about and write a paper with his very personal thoughts on what Phoenix might be and which concept and ideas might inspire it. The result was the report

A Town Called Zero

In this he identified ideas and concepts that included building fabric as music and sound instrument; the educational potential of a landmark regeneration project; the revolution of the building site through modern methods of construction and other innovation; the sustainable neighbourhood as a site of radical cross-cultural exchange and learning; and the past, present and future of the Lewes vernacular.

Oliver has also contributed work on timber buildings and place-projects around Europe and a think piece on landscape and design.

Mining the Anthropocene

Another piece of foundational thinking was commissioned from local architect and distinguished environmental activist and practitioner, Duncan Baker Brown. Duncan’s paper sought to identify the importance of ‘mining’ the existing site for its raw materials for construction – wasting nothing – and repurposing existing structures and buildings where possible. It was called Mining the Anthropocene.

Phoenix Mobility Vision

While this report by WSP was not finalised until July 2022 much of the research, analysis and views expressed in it were made available to the design team throughout the project planning and design process.

Key Views

A report was commissioned to study the landscape context of Lewes in the South Downs landscape. This research mapped long distant views and key views of the Phoenix site area. This research helped inform some of the early masterplanning work before the appointment of Terrafirma, the landscape and visual impact consultants.