THE PHOENIX MASTERPLAN

from The Phoenix – Design & Access Statement

by Human Nature (Places)

Phoenix The

Maximising Connectivity & Access

Youth & Playfulness

River & Rainfall

Circular Economy

Flooding

Five Minute Walkable Neighbourhood

Neighbourhood Centre & a Network of Gathering Spaces

Framing Views

Apartment Types, Plot Differentiation & Diversity

Flood Wall & River Walk

Streets for People

The smaller homes, more choice, more affordable homes, more families housed

Bike Culture

Co-Mobility Services, Parking & Low Traffic Streets

Adaptive Reuse & Mining the Anthropocene

A River Runs Through Weave & Stitch

Co-Mobility Services

Causeway Edge & Interface

Temporal Landscapes

Brownfield & Living Cultural Heritage

Life Between Buildings

Landscape & The Senses Safety

Key Views

5.2 CONSTRAINTS

The Fire Station

The station on North Street is the base for essential emergency fire services. In previous proposals the intention was to relocate this base but the Santon proposals lacked core financial credibility even without the cost of such a relocation.

The price of securing a new site and building a station to the requirements of the service are prohibitive and the current scheme cannot support such a re-location without the risk of undermining affordable housing and other social infrastructure provision. Among other things this means that moving North Street over its entire length – other than a kink just beyond the site of the proposed new Foundry Health Centre and by a few metres west in the current proposals together with providing a more generous curtilage for the station – was not desirable or even possible.

River & Rainfall Flooding

Plans for the Phoenix must not just protect future residents and businesses on site from two types of flooding but also the adjacent streets in the Pells. In the consented North Street Quarter NSQ) scheme this was to be achieved by a vast underground concrete reservoir doubling up as a car park, and by raising the level of the land by the river’s edge. This proposal favours a more sustainable and indeed robust approach –especially given revised upward flood projections – using a flood defence wall and a mosaic of engineered rain gardens and other Sustainable Urban Drainage (SUDS). Together these also provide exceptional new amenity in terms of the elevated river walk, belvedere, and beautiful rain gardens in the courtyards of blocks, along streets and in public squares. The rain gardens are situated in courtyards and on streets and are efficient, multi-functional resources. They serve as playgrounds, gardens, habitat and general recreational spaces. The rain gardens and the proposed flood wall – designed painstakingly in collaboration with the Environment Agency, County Council and local residents - represent a large-scale intervention in the landscape of this site and shape its plan in several significant ways.

Causeway Edge & Interface

The causeway sits 2.5-3.0 metres – almost one storey height – above the Phoenix and is a challenging obstacle to connectivity between Lewes town centre and the new site. There is currently only one designated, safe pedestrian crossing; any new crossings face the further obstacle of the level drop to the south of the causeway into a supermarket car park.

The line of trees running along the causeway reinforce a psychological barrier too. For anyone entering and leaving the town here by road, the Phoenix site is concealed and remote. The strategy for addressing these issues is set out in other sections of this DAS but is predicated upon easing the movement between levels via new ramped pedestrian and cycling connections, the Co-Mobility Hub with its lifts and stairs and the proposed Foreshore Park which runs parallel to causeway and connects eastwards to the new river walk. The planting scheme here will ensure views from the causeway into the Phoenix and a comparatively active frontage with lively uses and the movement of people along and across it. The ground will also be prepared for a future connection under the Causeway bridge to Cliffe High Street once the former Wenban Smith timber buildings are repurposed or removed as part of any redevelopment of the John Lewis Partnership site to the west.

Brownfield & Living Cultural Heritage

The industries supported by the River Ouse gave life to Lewes: the famous Phoenix Ironworks whose products, such as lamposts and bandstands, still grace English seaside towns while its drain covers are everywhere here; a papermill which produced bank notes; numerous breweries using pure water from chalk aquifers; several timber yards and shipyards upstream, as well as downstream, from Cliffe bridge; plus every kind of commerce using barges and sailing ships from Newhaven.

These former industrial buildings are as much a part of the history of this town as finer houses or civic buildings – they were once its economic life blood and may yet be again.

Retaining the best of the structures and repurposing them for new uses – especially where, as is proposed here, these bring employment and economic vitality in the new economy and double down on some of Lewes’ established economic strengths in the creative and maker’s tradition – seems important. In these ways a ‘living cultural heritage’ can be supported. It has the additional merit of safeguarding embodied carbon, an increasingly important factor in the construction sector in the race to meaningful carbon ‘Net Zero’.

So, here, it is suggested that these constraints can become new assets: the industrial memory is held and sustained, the scheme benefits from robust and adaptable structures for buildings which when re-skinned with modern lightweight materials and solar energy cells provide elegant and fitting new containers for wealth-generating and in the case of the plans for the refurbished Soap Factory, a health-generating activity. Furthermore, a key view of the castle to the south-west is enhanced as future residents and visitors look from the elevated garden on the flood wall over the low-slung industrial structures towards the castle and its neighbour, Brack Mount.

Other elements of the brownfield condition bring greater challenges. Routes of utilities connections, old foundations, concreted-over surfaces and more, increase cost in remediation and occasionally distort the patterns and shapes of development. But again there is an upside to this apparent down. Real places, often the better places we come to know and love, typically have irregularities, distortions and accidents as it were; they respond to the landscape they inherit and are profoundly shaped by it.

Key Views

The Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment studies that accompany this DAS formally detail the approach to key views and clearly many other views are affected.

The design of proposed development – to mitigate the effects of a new neighbourhood upon the castle complex – has paid close attention to the grain and layout of the site. Development to the south has sought to provide a smooth transition from the tight grained development of the town into the looser grain development of the former industrial centre framing the view of the castle and Brack Mount. The Landscape and Visual Impact assessment (LVIA) concludes the proposed development would not harm the breathtaking views that contribute to the SDNP’s Special Qualities.

Green Wall: scheduled ancient monument

The monument holds extensive archaeological and historic interest, as part of the infrastructure of the medieval town. Alongside evidencing the construction methods and techniques of medieval town walls, the monument has the potential to contribute towards the understanding of the development of Lewes and the extent or intended extent of the medieval town. The monument also has the potential to retain evidence relating to periods of construction and repair, relating to historic events such as the Battle of Lewes in 1264.

The Phoenix design has been made with a view to celebrating this monument with the result according to the Heritage Report in the Environmental Statement.

“An impact of major beneficial magnitude upon a heritage asset of high sensitivity is considered to result in an effect of very large significance.”

Primary Streets & Utilities

Both of the primary streets at the Phoenix serve as significant utility corridors including some that service the whole town. While new utility connections and media are being added the scheme did not wish to carry the additional expense of rerouting all extant services or deflecting building blocks to avoid crossing mains connections expected where this was essential.

Moreover, the two main streets at the Phoenix are an established part of the industrial landscape here and the memory of this is important to the scheme and so other than a modest shift of North Street to allow more direct connections and more efficient housing blocks to each side of the street, the design team argued for their retention. And of course there would be a significant embodied carbon debt created by the wholescale removal of such fabric. Accordingly, these streets shape the framework – the armature – for the Phoenix.

Conservation Area

The Lewes and Malling Deanery Conservation Areas are the key ones in relation to the Phoenix. The buildings and public realm comprising the proposed development have been designed in such a way that limits (or enhances) its impact on the conservation area. Design aspects potentially impacting the Lewes Conservation Area (particularly material palette, form and urban grain) will be controlled via the Design Code and future Reserved Matters Planning Applications (RMAs).

Viability

After repeated attempts, there has been no redevelopment of the Phoenix – still less, a high quality, fine-grained, mixed-use development, fit to meet the challenges of Net Zero and the regeneration of habitats and biodiversity. Viability is, of course, key. Without it all policies and designs, however worthy, are redundant.

Following the failure of the previous scheme and the disappointment felt by many at this, it was imperative to ground new proposals in economic reality and deliverability however challenging this might be. The Phoenix plans and designs presented in these pages have been costed and valued at each stage of their evolution by statured consultants.

The learning from this continuous economic appraisal process has informed the scheme described in this DAS and in particular many of the so-called Big Moves listed and described here. Wherever possible the attempt has been made to create a trinity of design quality wins, sustainability wins and economic wins. For instance, the creation of a Co-Mobility Hub which concentrates most of the reduced parking in one place on the site adjacent to the Phoenix Causeway minimises traffic disruption for Lewes, promotes cleaner air, safety and houses extensive EV car club, car hire, EV shuttle bus and EV bike hire facilities. But it also frees up land for more homes, employment and community facilities. The latter then provide the range of offer and choice and critical mass for a walkable neighbourhood which in turn reduces car-dependency.

In these ways the streets of the Phoenix become quieter, safer, cleaner, easier and more pleasurable to walk and even play in improving the overall experience of living here. Widespread community benefits follow: they improve social interaction, foster neighbourliness, stimulate active travel and contribute to healthier living and wellbeing. Moreover, the extra quantum of ‘development’ on the site – with land freed from the need to allocate land to high levels of car parking – enables the abnormal brownfield remediation and flood defence costs to be met and the new place to be built to a standard fitting for its beautiful historical context.

Similarly, the proposed large-scale rain gardens in the courtyard blocks address pluvial flooding while also providing places to play, sit, relax, overlook and experience openness and greenery, garden, and valuable habitat for insects and birdlife. In short, they are multi-functional and excellent value for money overall. They are also less expensive to provide than an underground car park and flood reservoir, adding to the overall viability of the project.

5.3 DESIGN PRINCIPLES & CONCEPTS

A key task of any DAS is to set out the design principles and concepts upon which a scheme a plan and its companion designs – are based. The principles and concepts that follow flow from the values, purposes and policies described in earlier sections, the Phoenix Blueprint and precedent studies, and are informed by the landscape context, (reinforce its genius loci and principal site constraints). These in turn inform the Big Moves in the masterplan.

Mind, Body & Spirit: Health & Wellbeing

This is to craft a place, spaces, buildings and companion strategies that are intrinsically health-enabling They invite and support healthy living, optimise many types of social interactions (per Jan Gehl and Jane Jacobs’ analyses and guidelines) reduce social isolation and loneliness, and encourage and enable active living. This principle leads in the plans here to, among other things, the siting and building of the Health Centre; the family activity centre in the Soap Factory; low traffic streets which in turn leave the immediate local air unpoisoned and make walking and cycling safe and pleasurable; plentiful public gathering spaces on corners, in set piece squares and on elevated gardens on the Belvedere; in shared courtyard and other gardens.

Common Wealth

To share local resources and opportunity more strategically and precisely across the communities of the town to address disadvantage and exclusion, help lift people out of isolation and poverty, ‘level-up’ and generate a more convivial, fairer, sharing society. As a principle informing design, this leads: to more accessible and free community assets such as the public spaces; play; cost-effective provision of bouldering, climbing, skating, dance, music, gym and party spaces (Soap Factory); cheaper mobility – EV car club, car share etc, saving car-using households more than £3,000 per year on average ; warmer homes and cheaper energy through the specification and design of homes and the energy grid; the community canteen at the Foundry Yards in the Every Hall which offers inexpensive good-quality community meals (with food form local farms and community gardens) in a welcoming, nonstigmatising space; and, via the construction strategy, multiple opportunities for young people to become involved in almost all aspects of construction using timber and other biomaterials. Moreover, the varied employment spaces, organised thematically under the themes of creative and circular economies are potentially fast-growing sectors of the economy and build on existing clustered strengths in Lewes and district.

Making Spaces

Lewes and the Phoenix itself have a tradition of making. From the heavy industry of the Ironworks to joinery, model-making and art. This design principle is to ensure that this tradition is celebrated in future through the workshops in the repurposed and refurbished Foundry Workshops, studios, gallery, events spaces, and in the way the buildings are constructed, finished and fitted out.

Youth & Playfulness

Not only are there insufficient houses for younger people of all kinds in Lewes but there is also a dearth of facilities and services. Accordingly, Lewes has a comparatively aged and ageing population. It is at risk over time of losing economic vitality and a more balanced demographic. Acknowledging this, the Phoenix is committed to types of homes – principally smaller apartments and a broad housing choice – that offer a place to start out in life and a place to stay. These proposals also offer sporty activities at the Soap Factory, music, play, theatre, art and more at the events space and Every Hall, apprenticeships in timber construction, and multiple employment opportunities.

Circular Economy

This principle – which seeks to eliminate waste and create valuable new products and services from redundant materials – reinforces commitment at the Phoenix to: repurposing structures; retaining the principal streets; the waste strategy; community gardening, the proposals for composting and recycling soil nutrients; the co-mobility services and more. It also applies very directly to the strategy of building primarily in engineered timber.

Adaptive Reuse & Mining the Anthropocene

Much has been written already in this DAS about the importance of holding the memory of a landscape in the form of the plan and in the structures of buildings that still have structural integrity or that can be readily upgraded. More than this, in a climate emergency embodied carbon in structures and in all materials on a former industrial site like this, need to be respected and exploited. Work by Baker Brown architects and Local Works Studios, by steel specialist and former local apprentice. Paul Myles, and by eminent civil and structural engineers Expedition, have informed the proposals on the Thomas Paine bridge, the retention of the Soap Factory, Every Hall and Foundry Workshops structures and the reuse/ re-assembly of structural elements of the Phoenix Gallery.

A River Runs Through

The need to celebrate the Ouse, its ebb and flow, muddy tidal banks, the connection with adjacent flood meadows and to the English Channel; its history in making Lewes a thriving inland port with industry on the Phoenix, and to respect its power to rise and flood.

Life Between Buildings

This is both a principle and to a lesser extent, with the benefit of Jan Gehl’s work, a science of how to design public spaces for high quality social interaction of many different kinds. It is commonplace for the architect to focus on the building – even to obsess about the building as an object – but others need to consider its relationships to its neighbours, to connectivity, to views, to light, to where people might gather, rest, meet, eat and drink outside, feel the wind on their faces.

Weave & Stitch

To maximise connectivity between the Phoenix and its host town; this in terms of its urban landscape, green spaces, and movement –especially by foot and bicycle.

Co-Mobility Services

To enable convenient and affordable, low impact movement that frees up streets for people, precious urban space for homes, community facilities and employment, reduces local air pollution, promotes active travel. This is enabled by a well-run multimode mobility services enterprise situated in the Co-Mobility Hub.

Landscape & The Senses

Landscapes are not just or perhaps even primarily what we see. They are experienced in many other ways. The Phoenix aims for a place that engages all of the senses: hearing, smell, sight, taste – but also the combinations of these as people experience place as a many-sided thing. Places have varying degrees of texture, colour, proportions, memory and history, old and new, quietude and noise, energy and calm, greenery and urbanity, wet and dry, natural or other smells (industrial and chemical…). Too many modern developments erase these experiences; the Phoenix seeks to combine them in ways that establish a sensuous mix for a richer human experience of places we live and belong in.

Temporal Landscape

Buildings built from ‘place’ bring another layer to experiencing the land – the landscape. They invite consideration of the processes by which the land is formed. As such, they instance materially – and building materials individually – a larger geo-morphological 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 (Oliver Lowenstein). Hence here, the commitment to building with nature – timber, hemp, biomaterials of many kinds – alongside reconstituted, salvaged materials.

Safety

Maslow’s basic human need transposed into a design principle. What makes a place, a space, a building be and feel safe? And for children and elderly people especially. Jane Jacobs wrote about the way older neighbourhoods have many ‘eyes on the street’ and plentiful reasons for different people to be in a place, for different reasons and at different times of the day. In short, she argued for a fine-grained, mixed-use neighbourhood. But it can be more than she envisaged including with shared courtyard gardens, community gardening, well-judged community spaces and facilities, multiple balconies onto streets, an intentional code for peer group behaviour that cultivates neighbourliness and civility.

Bike Culture

To embed cycling in the everyday behaviour and life of the Phoenix neighbourhood and beyond – across Lewes – as new, safe, cycle networks are established and electric bikes reduce in price and become more efficient. Bike Culture arises from ease of access to a full panoply of cycling services and facilities. These range from bike shop to repair, safe and pleasant streets and dedicated cycle connection through Phoenix and across the Thomas Paine bridge; it includes distributed, secure cycle parking and storage facilities, cargo and other bikes for hire, and protection from casual theft.

Streets for People

British streets are too often roads. Yet they are the lifeblood of towns, critical to social interaction, safety and the everyday experience of a place. Streets for people are well-proportioned, low traffic, benefit from appealing urbanism in terms of frontages, entrances, soft edges, and inviting and interesting building corners, overlooking, light and shade, and thoughtful planting, seating and vistas.

Elegance, Wit & Imperfection

Lewes is, in places, a joyous, noisy amalgam of histories, architectural fashion, building and economic competencies, odd compromises, and accidents and anomalies. Not just a box of toys but akin. And better for it. The Phoenix has several character areas and edges each quite different. And it also has to address historicism, sustainability, bioregionalism, landscape in its broadest definition, customer taste, buildability and breakthrough sustainability technology. It’s a fascinating blend. And it leads to a place that can be coherent and elegant but with enough wit and imperfection to keep it real.

Growing Community

These words have a rooted meeting in the wonderful food and community initiative in Stoke Newington in London, but also actually with Common Cause in Lewes itself. In short, these initiatives saw the opportunity to grow social connections in a place via food and food markets. Taking inspiration from these (and many other global urban food and community movements), the Phoenix seeks to grow community in many ways but community gardening, farming, composting, waste management is certainly one strand of this.

Biophilia: Super-Greening the Urban Environment

This is to bring new, natural life to the Phoenix, abundant greenery. Street trees, planted rain gardens and other SUDS, community gardens, urban farming, planters everywhere. The softer textures, colour, smells, insect and bird life, leaven the urbanity and connect us to natural landscapes beyond.

Beyond Planning: The Circle of Impact

This is Human Nature’s framework for exponential sustainability in which up to 12 levers of change in a place can be pulled to create transformational social, environmental and economic impacts. At the Phoenix, all 12 levers will be pulled and the compound effect is game-changing in regard to carbon and climate emergency, nature (both locally and in the bioregion), for people and their quality of life and even the whole-life economics of a development project and the future economy it supports. Some of the outcomes to which the Circle aspires are beyond the direct control of planning and the built environment. But many others are not. Places can make it far easier to walk and cycle or not; they can have renewable energy grids (or not), co-mobility services, a walkable neighbourhood, supergreened spaces with community gardens, shared courtyards and resources. But they can also create social and cultural environments in which people feel comfortable to live social, active, healthy, ‘handprint’ lives wherein negative impacts on the wider environment are minimised and positive impacts maximised. Without collective behavioural change climate and nature regeneration targets will never be met; and without supportive built environments and infrastructures behavioural change at scale might be too difficult to achieve. The Phoenix addresses both.

Prospect & Refuge

In a sharing community, public space such as streets and squares and shared courtyard, semiprivate gardens, begin at the threshold of the properties. Which means that those thresholds between shared and private space – the ‘refuge’, the home – need to be marked clearly with well-considered edges, well-framed doorways and strong doors.

Inside-Out

What does a contemporary home lifestyle need from a home in terms of its layout; And how might this influence the form of buildings –especially apartments – and their circulation, space requirements and more? And might living more sustainably need something different? Human Nature opts for offering choice in housing blocks in types, sizes and configurations of apartments, duplexes and townhouses within blocks , and what designers sometimes call, ‘broken plan’ layouts inside which enable residents to adapt and modify to suit their own tastes. This concept switches the focus from quality of public spectacle in urban form and texture to internal structure and configuration and reinforces the commitment to diversity rather than excessive repetition in the plan.

Open House

Open House is about introducing larger, shared rooms and external spaces in blocks that support neighbourliness and social connections. Essentially, these larger rooms can host social gatherings such as weekly dinners for neighbours. An international Open House movement has begun in which street, block and other quite modest parties happen regularly, sometimes weekly, often accompanied by music or other entertainment.

Raw + Craft

This is concerned with shifting the priority in building budgets towards the strength, quality of materials (in this case usually biomaterials) and adaptability and away from over elaborate finishes and fit outs. We maintain that people prefer a well-made building to a flimsy one. The materials need to be good enough to be left ‘raw’ and because in a Human Nature development engineered timber such as CLT and timber-framed cassettes or panels are widely used a ‘craft’ finish – something that the resident can bring their own judgement to – combines well. Craft here is not meant to be expensive hand-made items by artistic makers but rather individual expression of what the occupant would like and can afford. Human Nature offers lists of approved local contractors, decorators, and other tradespeople to support this approach.

5.4 TOWARDS A PLAN: BIG MOVES

Working iteratively through the values, purposes, policy and the landscape context that shape these proposals and especially the principal constraints and the key design principles and concepts identified in previous chapters, the design teams arrived at several Big Moves that would further craft the framework plan for the Phoenix. This in turn would determine its transition into a masterplan.

Shared Living

Land is scarce, precious and expensive. Carbon should and will become ever more scarce and expensive to emit carelessly. During the transition to 100% renewable generation, energy will continue to be expensive because of the quantum of sunk capital in outmoded infrastructures and production.

Housing is also expensive to build well, energy and other utilities infrastructure likewise. Owning and running a private car which on average will stand idle for c90% of its time, is also prohibitively expensive for many.

Alongside this, dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions have to happen to translate good intentions and hopeful policy about climate emergencies into reality.

At the heart of the solution to these dual and interrelated challenges is shared space, shared resources and what might be called shared living. This approach – a hallmark of a truly sustainable place in the 21st century – enables more people to be housed well but also to live affordably while reducing environmental impacts and enhancing health and wellbeing.

Cars in this part of town – the Phoenix – will now share streets with EV shuttle buses, bicycles and people and will cede priority to these. More people overall will be able to move around easily and safely and public space is freed up for seating, street trees and other planting.

People housed at the Phoenix will primarily be living in courtyard blocks with shared gardens, play areas and storage, and with attractive rain gardens.

These apartment blocks have shared lifts and entrances, some have playrooms, co-working spaces, bike storage, party rooms, shared roof gardens and even some communal kitchens for ‘openhouse’ neighbourly celebrations (please see the Phoenix Blueprint); some have laundry rooms.

Shared party walls increase energy efficiency in cost-effective ways, shared structural systems – including those with mass engineered timber – increase building efficiency and help ensure more money for quality spaces and buildings.

The Phoenix will have several inviting, fully public squares – shared spaces – for gathering and informal social mixing. One of these on the Belvedere will provide the only place in Lewes where people can stay, overlooking the river, and enjoy a drink and food in a lovely garden. The refurbished Every Hall and Foundry Workshops will provide covered publicly accessible spaces for yet more gathering and social connection, in this instance at the centre of the neighbourhood.

People can and will experience many forms of social interaction in spaces across the site, building a palpable sense of neighbourliness, civility and community.

The Phoenix co-mobility services meet the periodic need for longer distance travel in a highly cost-efficient way and for all. It is a profoundly fair and democratic way to enable mobility: it is cost-effective and an essential part of any serious push towards carbon Net Zero at a time when transport accounts for 24% of all emissions and private transport is 60% of that total. It also leads to more street life and social connection for people living at the Phoenix and in surrounding streets. The service can of course be extended to meet the needs of the town if, as expected, expressed demand grows.

The proposed energy grid – another shared resource – will provide affordable renewable heat and power to all homes and workplaces at a discount to prevailing market prices. The efficiency of the buildings will in any event substantially reduce energy bills.

The actions required to make these valuable gains achievable, affordable and appealing are contained in the plan and in its constituent designs. In fact they are key drivers of the masterplan for the scheme.

Maximising Connectivity & Access

The Phoenix area is a somewhat neglected, almost forgotten part of Lewes. The fact that there are few reasons for townspeople to go there currently is reinforced by its physical separation. A key job of the masterplan for the Phoenix was to stitch the Phoenix into the town physically and then, in future, also socially, economically, and culturally.

New connections are proposed along the Phoenix Causeway – the Foreshore Park is a new landscaped linear park which runs in parallel with the road which leads down to the river walk. It then runs the length of the river frontage of the Phoenix out to Willey’s bridge and the flood meadows beyond; as and once the former Wenban Smith timber sheds are redeveloped on the southern side of the Causeway it should be possible to create a new and direct connection under the bridge to Cliffe.

The pedestrian and bike crossing of the Causeway from the Foreshore Park is to be improved, made safer and otherwise more pleasant to use.

River walk – under these proposals it will be possible to step onto and off the river walk at several points through the neighbourhood.

The Co-Mobility Hub also provides a new connection. It enables people to move easily from the Causeway, down a level and into the Phoenix. Adjacent to this is a new footpath and cycling connection with the latter progressing to the Belvedere and over the proposed new Thomas Paine bridge to Malling Recreation.

A new footpath is also being created alongside the greenwall to reduce footfall along Waterloo Place. North Street and Phoenix Place are both being substantially enhanced with tree planting, furniture, multiple entrances. These are to be faced on both sides by elegant and textured buildings with multiple entrances, active frontages and inviting corners. The new Health Centre, serving all of Lewes and some of its District, and the Soap Factory likewise, provide important public services but also act as anchors in the plan.

The primary streets will also provide appealing thoroughfares to, for instance, the Pells, the river’s edge, the new slipway and the neighbourhood square in the Foundry Yards. The threshold of the end of North Street to the north to the Pells is framed elegantly with landscape and building treatments, making for a notable gateway experience from and into the neighbourhood.

Brook Street serves as a direct route and desire line for people walking and cycling to the Foundry Yards for the public spaces, nearby health services, the hospitality offers situated in the Yards and from there to the new river bridge.

The Five Minute, Walkable Neighbourhood

The walkable neighbourhood is an increasingly popular foundational device of urban design and for very good reasons.

Walkable neighbourhoods are common already to most historic town cores which predate the motor car. These older neighbourhoods are characterised by compact, high density, mixed-use development, short blocks, a varied roofscape and a complex framework and hierarchy of streets. Such a neighbourhood layout invites walking and makes the experience of so doing enjoyable and safe unless large buses and careless drivers speed along the purposely narrow streets. In Lewes the steep hills make walking for some difficult or even impossible and unappealing for many. But the Phoenix sits on low lying, relatively flat land in in the river valley which in the town extends past the junction of the precinct to Cliffe and School Hill, past the library, along Friar’s Walk, to the turning to the railway station and Depot Cinema (where a confluence of cafes, a pub and small, independent shops has formed) and all the way along Southover High Street, out towards Kingston.

At the Phoenix the multiple and interdependent aims of encouraging social interaction, promoting public health, supporting walking and cycling and creating a richly textured, sensuous urban experience through the architecture, materials and landscape treatments, call for a fine-grained, mixed-use development.

In these ways and taken together, most daily needs can be met by a short, pleasurable walk – less than five minutes – without recourse to motorised vehicles.

Neighbourhood Centre & a Network of Gathering Spaces

The confluence of the new bridge, public, cultural and commercial buildings and services situated in the remade Every Hall and Foundry Workshop point towards a centre of gravity to the Phoenix. The direction and orientation of the principal streets leading to and from the neighbourhood reinforce this.

The spaces here are not grand set-piece moments. Instead, they are quite modest, wellcrafted and intimate public spaces, south-west facing for good light and warmth, and shelter. They provide access to the garden on the Belvedere and to other public amenities.

Several other public squares across the site, made at different scales, serve as landmarks and significant moments such as intersections in the neighbourhood plan; they provide contemplative spaces with seating, often larger, ‘witness trees’ and other significant details and moments.

Framing Views

Lewes sits in the floodplain of the River Ouse, with a townscape defined by its roofline poetically stepping up the iconic South Downs’ chalk downland valley sides, with larger, less fine grained enclaves of industrial buildings sitting flat on the valley floor.

These characteristics of Lewes create stunning views of the surrounding downland, a meandering river and associated luscious habitats and key landmark buildings throughout the town. The building form, urban grain and streetscape of the new neighbourhood has been carefully considered so as to both frame existing views while creating key new views both in and out of the Phoenix. Certain design features regarding building height and street layout have been developed through close consultation with LVIA professionals, expert Masterplanners and the SDNPA.

The form and height of the new Neighbourhood Centre has been determined so that – when viewing from the north-east – the development ‘steps up’, both as a means of providing sensitive design in the context of the backdrop of the Lewes Conservation Area and to maintain views of Lewes Castle and Brack Mount. Existing, low-slung and historically interesting industrial structures are being retained, partially for this reason. The proposed new Thomas Paine bridge and Belevedere structure will create stunning new views of Lewes Castle and back mount, as well public realm from which to to appreciate surrounding landscape features such as Malling Down and the River Ouse.

Additionally, the orientation and street layout of buildings to the north of the neighbourhood have been designed to create dramatic new views of these key historic landmarks.

When entering the Lewes from the East, the Phoenix Causeway (currently an overengineered, pedestrian-unfriendly environment) provides a gateway moment to the town. The design of the south east corner of the neighbourhood and the Causeway edge has provided an opportunity to celebrate this gateway moment whilst humanising the streetscape. While is has dropped in height to an appropriate level due to consultation with the SDNPA and advice from LVIA consultants, the residential building adjacent to the river and the Causeway has been designed to retain and enhance key views of landmark buildings in Lewes, with its corresponding gable’s ‘speaking’ across the rooftops to Harvey’s Brewery and the Cliffe bridge.

Co-Mobility Services, Parking & Low Traffic Streets

The comparatively low parking provision in which the dominant model of private car ownership is substituted for by modern and highly effective and far more sustainable and affordable EV car club, hire, shuttle bus and EV bike services allows far more space for homes, greenery, seating, play, public space for people to enjoy and for much-needed community and employment spaces. It also allows the Phoenix streets to be low traffic, safe, clean and consequently a pleasure to live alongside and use.

The centralisation of the majority of car and van parking for the Phoenix and the relocation of the town car parking in a bespoke building – the Co-Mobility Hub – immediately adjacent to the Causeway, has many benefits. It allows ease of access to Phoenix from the main road, minimises traffic in the town centre even as it provides good access to the facilities and services located there. It also greatly enhances the liveability and accessibility of Phoenix Streets and public spaces.

The Smaller Homes, More Choice, More Affordable Homes, More Families Housed

The majority of the homes at the Phoenix will be apartments. The aim is to respond to the priority in terms of housing need for smaller one, two and three-bedroom homes and house more people in good quality, modern, lowmaintenance and environmentally sustainable accommodation. This more democratic, social and accessible model – making excellent use of the brownfield land and opening the development up to a far broader cross-section of the Lewes and wider population – requires a change to the urban form.

The different blocks proposed across the site provide a wealth of choice in terms of type, configuration and design, sizes, price points and tenures. And because Lewes is not a town benefitting currently from a wealth of apartments – still less those that buck the trend in the UK for cheaply built, singleaspect, utilitarian boxes – many of the housing blocks take on a new form, for Lewes at least, in terms of height, massing and other aesthetic expression.

In particular, the courtyard blocks which are typical of the Phoenix are similar in length and breadth and even height to some of the larger perimeter blocks in Lewes but have a different massing and configuration. This is because they are purpose-built, efficient and therefore accessible and affordable double-aspect apartments which meet the primary housing needs of the community. A key difference is that they have shared courtyard gardens rather than private gardens. These apartment blocks house more people well, perform well in terms of daylight, respond to the need for shared and even co-living and are comparatively cost-efficient. There are many examples of shared gardens in towns across the UK. These include, for instance, very expensive parts of West London (illustrating their desirability when designed and built well) – but the Phoenix blocks are also inspired by Amsterdam hofjes and high-quality Danish and Swedish apartment blocks where many different kinds of spaces are shared. The courtyards accommodate greenhouses, BBQ areas, gardens, play facilities, circulation spaces, ‘soft edges’ for resident seating and small tables, some storage and even playrooms. These block-types allow more sustainable higher density development – good density –and improved public amenity.

Flood Wall & River Walk

Flood risk has increased with projections of higher sea levels and rainfall due to global warming. The duty of care of the Phoenix flood defences has therefore increased even since the Santon NSQ scheme gained consent. In consultation with the EA and County Council, and following advice from its highly experienced specialist flood and civil engineers, Expedition, plans and designs for river wall have been formulated and are presented in this application. The flood wall houses a continuous river walk that runs from the Causeway bridge to Pells bridge. It ramps gently up to join the Belvedere at the centre of the Phoenix where it also extends as a mezzanine into the refurbished structures of the Every Hall and Foundry Workshops. The Belvedere is also connected to the new Thomas Paine bridge – a Big Move that improves the connection between the Phoenix, the Foundry Health Centre, employment opportunities and the facilities of the town centre with the residents of Malling and the increasing number of people living and working on the Retail Park. It also carries a new bike route.

Apartment Types, Plot Differentiation and Diversity

It is next to impossible due to cost, environmental performance and viability considerations to mirror the precise plot differentiation of older parts of Lewes even if at the Phoenix this was seen to be desirable.

The Phoenix buildings are bespoke apartment blocks mostly not town houses or villas.

When much of historic Lewes was built the population of the UK was c5.8 million compared to 67million now and the population demand necessarily affects urban form even if overall densities are still at the lower end of what CABE in its density study called, ‘Historic Town Infill.’

To address the need for landscape-led considerations in form and design it was decided to have many different kinds of blocks and differentiated plot widths types, entrances and facades within blocks. The challenge is met here by the deployment of different and notably talented architects working on different blocks and sometimes two or three on the larger blocks. The design team has also worked hard to craft corners to blocks that invite visual interest and create valuable moments in the plan.

A larger number of families – typically in smaller household units – can be accommodated well and in an environmentally responsible way but without losing the diversity of expression and visual interest.

Urban designer and architect, Jonathan Trabatt, in his book, ‘The Plot’, argues that while diversity of architectural form can’t by itself produce socio-economic diversity – which is recognised as being at the heart of sustainable communities – it can create the urban conditions necessary to support it. This helps give what the great academic and writer on town planning and architecture Lewis Mumford, refers to as “gifts of complexity and surprise… functional suppleness and aesthetic variety… wellfilled spaces and friendly enclosures..” And it does drive the form and articulation of this plan. To prevent planned diversity from becoming too cacophonous as a visual experience, the golden threads and other devices in the sitewide Design Code have been established for continuity within the Phoenix and from the site to town. The result allows necessary complexity but with sufficient coherence and legibility.

Rain Gardens: Pluvial Flooding

In the extant planning consent for the scheme promoted by Santon, pluvial flooding was to be contained – at least in large part – in a giant underground reservoir that would double-up as a car park. The present proposals favour instead managing water in the open in engineered rain gardens.

The courtyard gardens across the site provide space for large, set-piece, engineered rain gardens that, together with a network of smaller planning features protect residents and businesses from pluvial flooding.

Health Centre

It is an obligation for the Phoenix to provide a new central facility for the Foundry Healthcare Practice. We also wanted to rehouse the popular and successful North Street dental practice and provide an adjacent pharmacy. Accordingly, in consultation with the Foundry Practice, their specialist project manager and the CCG, a specification evolved and was agreed and parameters and outline designs have been set.

In the aftermath of Covid and consequent changes in the model and practice of the delivery of primary care services, the scale and nature of the building has evolved. The Health Centre needs to be readily accessible, as close as possible given the constraints to the rest of the town, accessible from the Co-Mobility Hub and bus stops and on a site that could be brought forward early in the development so as to speed up the delivery of the new services it can provide for the people of Lewes. Accordingly, it is to be situated on the car park between Brook Street and Spring Gardens 100 metres from the CoMo and with drop-off facilities immediately adjacent to the building.

The Fire Station

The reasons for the retention of the fire station on North Street were set out earlier in this document. Should a better site be found for it in future and resources made available for it to move, the Phoenix plan allows a series of options as to how the land could be redeveloped in ways that integrate well with the plan in this DAS.

Employment & Community

The argument has already been made in this DAS for a neighbourhood that works better for its close-grained mix of uses – not just housing – and for the contribution this new place can make to the economic prosperity of the community and renewal of the Lewes economy.

Achieving this at the Phoenix is made easier by the presence of resilient industrial structures. These are to be repurposed and, alongside the quality of streets and public spaces and other amenity here such as the hotel and events and meetings spaces, they will attract enterprises to locate here and help them thrive.

These commercial and social uses animate the streets, bring life and improve the desirability of the whole place. This will be a place where, as Jane Jacobs memorably observed, there will be plenty of “eyes on the street” and places with the liveliness, intensity and diversity to “contain the seeds of their own regeneration”.

Golden Threads

Our architects have invested a great deal of time studying the structure, form, emblematic details and materials of historic Lewes – the inherited landscape. While it is accepted that a new development here cannot and certainly should not copy directly and that great care must be taken to avoid ersatz (mis) representation, elements that make Lewes distinctive and beautiful can be identified and re-interpreted here with integrity.

This is the task of the Source Book and Design Code which will act in future to control design quality much as it has in connection with the detailed designs prepared for the first homes by architects Ash Sakula at Willey’s Bridge. The design team, with help from local designers and other built environment specialists in Lewes, have identified a suite of so-called ‘Golden Threads’ that should be referenced in detailed designs that come forward in reserved matters planning applications.

By definition, some of the existing structures on the Phoenix site are Lewesian and they have a nobility born of their critical part in the social, economic and built history of the town. Retaining these here helps anchor the ‘new’ in the plan and alongside twittens and the retention of the primary streets reinforce the process of embedding Phoenix in its inherited landscape.

5.5 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sources cited from Sections 1-5

Wendell Berry, What I Stand For is What I Stand On (UK: Penguin, 2021).

Thomas Paine, The Writings of Thomas Paine, Vol. I (1774-1779).

Sarah Bayliss, Walk, talk and learn about Lewes, humannature-places.com, (2022, p.1).

United Nations Sustainable Development, THE 17 GOALS, (2015).

The Government of the United Kingdom, Net Zero Strategy: Build Back Greener, (UK, 2021).

Trussell Trust. Mid-Year Stats. (2022) Retrieved from trusselltrust.org/news-and-blog/lateststats/mid-year-stats/

South Downs National Park Authority, South Downs Local Plan 2014-2033, 2019.

Antonio Guterres, COP27, 7 November 2022, Sharm el-Sheikj, Egypt.

Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2014).

Trevor Beattie, ‘National Parks need resources to match our ambitions - says South Downs Chief Executive’, southdowns.gov.uk, 2022.

Rebecca Solnit, If you win the popular imagination, you change the game’: why we need new stories on climate, The Guardian, (2022).

Mary Annaise Heglar, To Build a Beautiful World, You First Have to Imagine It, The Nation, (2021).

John Holdren, as cited in Thomas L. Friedman, Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — And How It Can Renew America, (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).

Paul Hawken, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, (UK: Penguin, 2018).

Pooran Desai, (2023, January). Happy New Year. What a start to 2023:The Year of The Great Paradigm Shift. We have crossed climate tipping points. LinkedIn. linkedin.com/in/poorandesai-2847009/recent-activity/shares/

John Elkington, Green Swans: The Coming Boom In Regenerative Capitalism, (Texas: Greenleaf Book Group, 2020).

Peter Kalmus, Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution, (Canada: New Society Publishers, 2017).

Wendell Berry, What I Stand For is What I Stand On (UK: Penguin, 2021) (3)

Patrick Vallance, The IPCC report is clear: nothing short of transforming society will avert catastrophe, The Guardian, (2021).

Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, (New York, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2021).

South Downs National Park Authority, Adopted Design Guide, July 2022, amended August 2022.