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A new park and a greener future for Tottenham Hale
Community consultation event. © Levitt Bernstein
A park in North London is to be completely renewed, addressing climate resilience and the needs of a fast-growing population.
Down Lane Park is a well-loved green space at the heart of a rapidly changing community in Tottenham Hale. It is a park of two distinct halves, which have differing but established landscape characters. Our masterplan for the park’s renewal has evolved through a process of co-design we have led since spring 2022, alongside our client Haringey Council (combining both Parks and Regeneration departments).
Plans to improve Down Lane Park have been created in partnership with the Community Design Group (CDG), which preceded our appointment and was already a fully functioning group when we joined the project. The CDG is a diverse group that represents the local community and provides a range of lived experience. Their agreed focus is to shape the masterplan proposals, inform engagement strategy and build support for designs by channelling feedback from residents and groups using the park.
Our initial aim of the co-design process was to establish two masterplan options to be taken to wider public engagement in the autumn.
Our first session with the CDG took place in May 2022 and aimed to give comfort in relation to our track record in delivery and our practice’s approach to people-centred and sustainable design. Working with Lisa Taylor from Coherent Cities as co-design facilitator, we mapped out the structure of meetings (always starting with a recap from the previous) and marked a timeline for the co-design process, with the goal of a planning submission in the following spring. The CDG’s commitment and investment in the process has been extensive and hugely appreciated.
Early CDG sessions involved understanding the site through the eyes of local people, agreeing priorities to be addressed and how ‘success’ might be measured for co-design. Key issues quickly came to the fore, such as inclusive access, opening up the park for more groups to feel safe and better catered-for (including young women and girls) and tackling crime and antisocial behaviour. Alongside these themes came an outpouring of concerned comments about funding, access to nature, adequate toilet provision and – the big one – how to create a park with sufficient resilience to support new residents resulting from the growth of Tottenham Hale.
Each CDG meeting dealt with a handful of pre-agreed topics like boundaries, entrances, and pathways and included a masterplanning session where the group was subdivided into tables, working with a landscape architect to express preferences on aspects such as routes, entrances, play locations and, critically, a community ‘hub’ building (either augmenting the existing or replacing).
Boundary railings were a significant talking point within the group and designs incorporated a range of responses, depending on setting and the intensity of use within their bounds. To the north, Down Lane Park presents as a classic London park, with perimeter railings lined by mature trees. The western street edge will be partly planted with native hedging, with future hedge-laying work envisaged through community stewardship. Dead hedges, formed by deadwood sifted from an abundance of lime (Tilia) trees and branches from large-scale lifting of clear stems, offer further habitat value while improving sightlines and a sense of safety within the park. At maturity, these new interventions will allow the future removal and recycling of railings, with funds from the scrap metal value being ploughed back into the park. To the eastern street edge, there is an aspiration to connect a future school street to the park with the adjacent Harris Academy school; railings will be removed to help the park reach out and entice children across bridges over SuDS basins and towards glimpses of new play features. The park will remain ‘well defined’ but we expect these moves to enhance greening, improve permeability, and accessibility and start to reinvent the park’s current identity – given also that gates and railings are never locked at night under Haringey policy.
Our initial aim of the co-design process was to establish two masterplan options to be taken to wider public engagement in the autumn. This was achieved following six successful meetings with the CDG, and the strength of consensus within the group meant that the main key variable between the options was the location of the hub building. Public responses didn’t offer a clear consensus for either option for the hub location, and an exercise to review the existing building concluded that the form and structure was too constraining to be viable. The location of the existing facility repurposes a former recreational building (with bowling green) tucked into the south of the park. Safe access through the park out of daylight hours and a lack of a park-facing sense of arrival are both problematic qualities. Despite very concerted efforts to address these failings by the facility’s operator, the decision to provide a high-quality new building, designed using Passivhaus principles, was agreed… the next challenge was to agree its location! A study showing a series of alternative building locations was put forward to the CDG, with an evaluation against each to consider aspects such as visibility, impact on trees, ease of access out of daylight hours and street presence. This stretched the agreed testing from two to eight locations but was critical to maintain support of the CDG and ensure that all voices and opinions were adequately considered. The co-design process can mean that unforeseen issues arise and radically change, or impact upon intended workflows, but flexibility in approach (and programme!) is critical to both sustaining relationships and achieving an outcome that maintains the confidence of the group.
The hub ‘vision’ is for a landmark, sustainable building that fulfils the needs of the local community, while minimising its impact on the park. A community garden will sit directly alongside the hub (another area of hardstanding to be turned into green space) with a playful boundary celebrating garden activities and inviting people to learn more about it. The hub building will provide ‘eyes’ onto the park, with a café offering a south-facing terrace extending towards a multi-age play area with existing trees. Existing sports provisions include tennis and an all-weather pitch – both to be retained and complemented by new courts for basketball and netball. A relationship between the sports courts, play and hub building will provide interstitial spaces to be designed and exploited by young people.
A recent engagement session to workshop ideas with young people, including women and girls, has shaped proposals for spaces that can support performance, socialising, watching sports, reading and flexible seating forms for friends and sibling groups.
Diversifying the offer of current ‘dead space’ within the park was a key observation from the outset and ensuring flexible use of space will be fundamental to detailed designs. Colour, pattern and vibrancy of surface materials have been favoured within areas around the hub and leisure zone, and the style of work by locally celebrated artists such as Yinka Ilori have been discussed as a forward-facing expression of the park’s identity. Traces of a rich cultural and manufacturing history around the park also have their place, and play concepts being developed include pencil-shaving forms as sculpture, play and flexible seating.
A recent engagement session to workshop ideas with young people, including women and girls, has shaped proposals for spaces that can support performance, socialising, watching sports, reading and flexible seating forms for friends and sibling groups.
The new Down Lane Park masterplan will create a high-quality ‘green destination’ for local people, but the success of the project will also be measured on how the park serves as a green waymarker for active travel to wider Haringey destinations, including The Paddock, Tottenham Marshes, Walthamstow Wetlands and Tottenham High Road. Increasing the permeability of the park, and the ease of arrival for all, is complemented by the ability of the park to signpost these wider destinations and act as a stopping point for cyclists and other wheeled vehicles. New park entrances to the south will promote alternative corridors of movement to and through the park, including in evening times when vibrancy will be created by neighbouring retail offers, the new community hub building, sports courts and more convenient park entrances. Lighting design (by Light Follows Behaviour) will complement and strengthen these safe movement routes, reinforcing points of arrival and celebrating new community assets like the hub building.
Phase one of the masterplan has just been awarded the maximum level of funding available from the Mayor of London’s Green and Resilient Spaces Fund (GRSF) for 2023. This will kick-start the creation of new diverse habitats and the introduction of sustainable drainage devices within the park, layering through interventions for play and spaces for outdoor gym and self-guided sports.
Our engagement with Haringey Council’s parks team, who are responsible for gardening and maintenance within the park, has informed proposals, and selective mowing regimes are already being introduced to better understand the species within the existing seed bank. Habitat creation will diversify species being supported while also creating more pleasant and attractive spaces that give a stronger sense of connection with nature. Existing woodland will be augmented to ensure ‘cool spaces’ are achieved in summer months and access to these areas will be substantially enhanced by a new network of crossing and perimeter paths (all with permeable construction).
Phase one will adopt the principles of climate change resilience, with a diverse new tree and plant palette selected for suitability for the changing UK climate. The introduction of new basin landforms edging the park to the east will allow surface-water runoff to be captured from an adjacent highway, reducing pressure on drainage systems while creating a new habitat type for the park. The basins will be playable, promoting further interaction with the park landscape via a new network of pathways designed to connect all visitors with woodland areas – something the park currently lacks. Access to woodland ‘cool spaces’ will allow refuge for both people and wildlife, with features including dead hedges and log piles. These works will commence in time for spring tree planting in 2024, when we hope to welcome every member of the Community Design Group to help as the first new trees are planted.
Kate Digney is Head of Landscape at Levitt Bernstein where she leads sustainable design across a range of project sectors. Throughout her career Kate has drawn insight from working with local communities, putting the needs of local people at the heart of place-making proposals.
