10 minute read
Landscape and highways: a journey to progress
The pioneering A21 Scotney Castle green bridge in Kent (Fira Landscape Architects, National Highways, National Trust) was the first green bridge to be constructed in the UK, in 2006. The concept was designed by LUC to connect National Trust land severed by the A21, maintaining the original ridgeline as well as access for wildlife such as local dormice. © Fira Landscape Architects
Vice President of the Landscape Institute, Noel Farrer, is a landscape architect and member of National Highways’ Strategic Design Panel. Here, Noel argues what a landscape-led approach to roadbuilding offers.
The expression “Which side of the road do you live?” is common and reflects the fundamental difference that ten to twenty metres of land can make when you put a road on it. Roads divide places, watercourses, habitats, flora and fauna, people, communities – everything.
Roads and other infrastructure projects of national significance represent the greatest physical changes and the largest marks we make on our urban and rural landscapes. Our considerations for new roads must therefore recognise and address all the impacts and opportunities they create. It is now well-evidenced that our road infrastructure and the vehicles that travel on it have truly massive and wideranging impacts. These can be felt in almost every aspect of our lifestyles, quality of life, health, natural systems, communities, connections, places and planet. With this understanding comes great challenge and responsibility –but also great opportunity.
Historically, too much emphasis has been focused on one singular objective: to foster efficient vehicular movement within and between places. The approach has often led to severed, unsafe and inhospitable environments in neighbourhoods across the country, with roads now commonly recognised for the negative consequences they have for the very places they were built to serve. We can do much better.
Currently, most new roads, once decided upon, are purely perceived as being a problem-solving, engineering challenge, rather than a multiple-outcomes-led opportunity.
The pitfall is that whilst this approach enables the delivery of efficient, safe and serviceable new roads, it is simply not sufficient to plan and design for project benefits beyond the road itself. This means that addressing wider outcomes is done through mitigation or offsetting, after the road is built. The challenge remains to broaden the outlook, and recognise both the impact of what we build and the necessity of prioritising the wider benefits that road projects offer.
A landscape-led approach to road infrastructure has the potential to encourage the perspective we need, better aligned to multiple and varied outcomes, in which infrastructure investment represents greater value for money, whilst also benefiting people, place and nature.
Progress is being made in the highways sector, with more and more projects now exemplifying how a landscape-led approach can deliver the multi-dimensional, cost-effective solutions that benefit local communities and surrounding environments holistically. These best practices, detailed below, should be widely adopted at local, regional and national scales.
Early budgeting
Government budgets currently only include the costs for building the road, which means any additional benefits proposed after the first budget is set are considered ‘extras’, and therefore can become difficult to justify. Schemes which bring landscape professionals in at an early stage benefit from an initial landscape analysis of the site, which enables much broader, integrated outcomes for relatively little cost:
Appraisal of existing land use and how best to compensate for lost habitat.
Engaging communities to understand the potential benefits the project can offer local people.
Incorporating basic masterplanning of any wider development in proximity to the road to ensure connections and wider landscape benefits are considered and budgeted for.
Assessing local landscape character and heritage to ensure appropriate detailing and design contributes to the local character.
Designating site boundaries (red lines) to accommodate new habitat creation and wider environmental net gain, rather than the road in isolation.
Appraising best practice for on-site soil, including movement, management and reuse.
Developing a connectivity plan to integrate public rights of way (PROW) and active travel routes, considering investment outside the red line area.
Developing a water management plan so that run-off ponds and existing watercourses also promote public amenity, play, Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG), and sustainable drainage schemes (SuDS).
Severance
New roads divide environments, but the creation of crossing points triggers complexity and costs, meaning they often end up being inadequate for users. This is as true for badgers and other animals as it is for humans.
A design process starting with the landscapeing through which the road travels would negotiate crossing points (and the severance issue behind them) contextually. Any intervention should be led by a design team that recognises how this severance could be minimised, and connectivity maintained or even improved.
My experience of many new roads funded by the Housing Infrastructure Fund (HIF) is that even though they are funded on the basis of the creation of development sites for additional housing communities, the road is designed wholly in isolation from the design or the wider masterplan for these homes. This means that all the advantages of integration and connectivity a new road could bring to the community is thereby lost.
The A120 to A133 link road in Colchester will run through land being masterplanned for over 7,000 new homes as part of a new garden village, extending to 25,000 homes in the wider area. The road layout and site extent have little regard for the masterplan development or wider project outcomes. © Essex County Council.
Progress is being made in the highways sector, with more and more projects now exemplifying how a landscapeled approach can deliver the multidimensional, cost-effective solutions that benefit local communities and surrounding environments holistically.
Landscape character and placemaking
The introduction of new roads changes and reshapes places. Movement patterns are altered, juxtapositions changed, new desire lines introduced. We need to understand the place through which the road will pass by undertaking landscape character appraisals, then assessing how a new road can contribute to the character and appeal of a place. Landscape-led approaches ensure that the design process for new roads identifies the impacts and opportunities and creates a net-positive balance of outcomes.
Water management
Water management around roads requires demanding storage and runoff capacities, and great understanding of the impacts roads have on natural watercourses, water flows and land drainage. Within this challenge we find mitigation measures and wider opportunities. Current engineering approaches accommodate the mitigation of torrential rain, and this work now regularly includes pondside planting and soft landscaped areas to encourage wildlife habitats. However, more engagement with the local communities could shed light on completely different benefits of water storage ponds, such as amenity areas for play and recreation. To realise these holistic outcomes, we must switch focus from the road itself to a wider landscape appraisal area.
Soil (waste, management and reuse)
Road construction accounts for a large part of the soil we send to landfill as waste. With soil sequestering 95% of the UK’s terrestrial carbon stock,¹ the road construction industry can and should provide leadership in the responsible use and reuse of living soils to preserve this important material and so it is not treated as waste. Progress is being made here, benefiting greatly from the skills and expertise of landscape professionals, but all road projects should be looking to assess the soil quality, types and quantities of each on the site and prepare a methodology for its movement and reuse.
Biodiversity and habitat creation
The high cost of roads understandably demands strict cost management, which often starts with the compulsory purchase of the minimum area of land possible to create the road. All additional benefits after the budget is set are perceived as extras to be minimised, but with more strategic budgeting, far greater outcomes for nature could be realised.
A pre-budget landscape appraisal would stipulate that where a road requires the removal of a section of habitat, at this earliest stage, the land compulsory purchase agreement for the road can include additional land to ensure the creation of a viable new habitat. A landscape-led approach is essential for informing this strategic decision making, and helping infrastructure projects to integrate BNG now and when it becomes mandatory for nationally significant infrastructure projects from November 2025.
Stewardship and maintenance
The ongoing stewardship and maintenance of roads is currently almost solely driven by safety and road use. We must continue to strive towards better ecological thinking, for example higher BNG, reduction in mowing, and leaving more trees alone. The low survival rate for newly planted trees on roadsides, resulting from the minimal establishment care they receive, can be dramatically improved. The relative costs for better procurement and increases in skills, which could make a profound difference to long-term success, should be considered.
Conclusion
We know that natural systems must be fully integrated with our own human systems for the benefit or even survival of both. Highways present a hugely significant lever for managing how these systems interact.
An understanding of, and commitment to, a truly holistic, landscape-led approach is required, especially at the earliest budgeting stages of road projects. Working with colleagues across the highways sector, we can achieve the broad range of benefits that society and the environment now demand from future roadbuilding.
Noel Farrer PPLI is Vice President of the Landscape Institute and director of Farrer Huxley Landscape Architects.
National Highways Strategic Design Panel
How the LI and National Highways work together to promote better road building in the UK
The National Highways’ (previously Highways England) Strategic Design Panel is drawn from a wide range of interest groups and professions, with the objective of encouraging National Highways to deliver greater design excellence in all aspects of the design and management of the strategic road network. I have sat on the panel for eight years, and as a result, I’m glad that the understanding of landscape within the group, and the importance of landscape considerations in highways projects, has steadily improved. The panel’s work has increasingly shaped and identified the opportunities for progress in roadbuilding, and the nature of changes that are required. This has led to the ‘Road to Good Design’ report, which promotes ten design principles for meeting a broad range of design outcomes.
Noel Farrer PPLI, Vice President of the Landscape Institute and National Highways Strategic Design Panel member
Our Strategic Design Panel has been vital in helping us produce and promote our design vision and principles of good road design. First published in 2018, and subsequently embedded into standard, the ‘Road to Good Design’ report highlights a series of integrated principles to improve the design quality of our road network. We’re proud to be now putting these principles into practice. In addition to ensuring that designs cater for people’s needs, our design principles include a focus on ‘place’, ensuring that design is restrained, environmentally sustainable and fits its surroundings. The place, the geography and the landscape dictate so much of road design. Good design is also collaborative, and we value our relationship with the Landscape Institute.
Dean Kerwick-Chrisp, MA BA(Hons) DipLA Principal Environmental Advisor at National Highways
