Urban Jigsaw: how London's Oxford Street could soon be lined with drone pick-up points

A new Royal Academy exhibition shows the future of some of city's busiest areas, says Robert Bevan
Transforming the city: Chetwoods Architects’ scheme for Oxford Street
Laurie Chetwood
Robert Bevan27 April 2016

Oxford Street is the most polluted street in Europe. Some would say the world — although clearly they’ve never been to Manila. In 2015 the shoppers’ Mecca exceeded allowable emissions for the whole year in just the first four days of January.

“Just in time” delivery to its shops hasn’t helped. Storage space has been minimised to maximise sales floors, with the consequence that delivery vans now idle their engines on sidestreets, using the public highway as part of the shops’ private enterprise. Almost 90 per cent of London freight is delivered in vans, with 39 per cent of these less than a quarter full.

Chetwoods Architects thinks there’s a solution. In 1927 a new railway opened under London. Not a Tube line but the six-mile Post Office railway. Until it closed in 2003 it carried letters and parcels to sorting offices between Paddington and Whitechapel on tiny, driverless trains. Chetwoods is proposing using the railway to distribute 16,000 parcels an hour from Heathrow across central London with spires built at nodes where drones could pick up their cargo.

The proposal is one of four that make up the Royal Academy’s new exhibition Urban Jigsaw, a show that presents the winners of an ideas competition for brownfield sites across London. The concept is to provide the missing pieces of London’s puzzle and propose new infrastructure, creative studios, innovative housing models and hubs for administering justice.

Chetwoods’ project is called the Well Line, cooled by London’s aquifer and featuring above-ground spires that generate bubbles of filtered air to reduce pollution. A line of these spires would spring up along a pedestrianised Oxford Street. Below street level, warehouses would be created in the well shafts along the line.

Make Good Waterloo by Alma-nac

In the long term, the architects suggest the scheme could form part of a “silicon line” housing data centres, 3D printing facilities and allowing the same-day delivery of components to support manufacturing, replacing some of the 1.25 million manufacturing jobs that have been lost to London over the past three decades. Seventeen per cent of the UK’s GDP is generated within the line’s five boroughs.

In the second Urban Jigsaw scheme, architectural practices Maccreanor Lavington and East have teamed up to look at the future of court buildings in the wake of the Ministry of Justice’s disposal of up to 20 courts across London. There are issues with some existing court buildings — not being able to separate out the accused from victims, for example — but the main impetus for the move is to save money. Detractors say the proposals will cause delays in accessing justice.

The architects are proposing instead to rebuild hermetic court buildings as mixed-use sites that can incorporate housing and other social uses, opening them up in the evening. Courts at Tottenham and Highbury Corner are used as examples. The courts remain but are reconfigured to be used more efficiently, with greater public access to the buildings and some areas hosting facilities such as legal advice centres.

The third competition-winning entry is Atelier Kite’s Hackney Kitchen, an idea that taps into the trend towards

co-housing, where renters share a building and make use of joint facilities. At the Hackney Kitchen the emphasis is on young singles. And food.

10 exhibitions not to miss in 2016

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Here, a “food palace” is the social space that residents share, with roof gardens above an adjacent Tube line (early ideas about creating a permaculture business as a funding stream have been shelved for now) and a grocery store and central hall that would be a cross between a kitchen and café where residents can choose food according to whether they can be bothered to cook that day. Centralised cleaning and waste disposal aim to make living greener and reduce washing-up arguments. The images are attractive but it takes a certain state of mind to be willing to give up that much privacy at home.

In the final Urban Jigsaw proposal the architectural practice Alma-nac addresses a different accommodation crisis — the loss of thousands of studios for artists and craftspeople that threatens to undermine London’s global lead as a creative powerhouse.

The architects use what they call “urban dentistry” to identify and fill slivers of unused urban sites — the random “space left over after planning” that characterises too many post-war developments — in order to build new studios. They have focused on Waterloo and one potential site is the space above the library in Lower Marsh. Here a wasteful single-storey building sitting between higher neighbours offers an ideal opportunity to build upwards above the existing facility.

Although schemes submitted to ideas competitions are not meant to be immediately implementable, some are already with us: developer The Collective, for instance, is one organisation already building co-housing where everything down to the bedding and loo paper is provided for residents. Its first scheme, Old Oak, opens next month at Willesden Junction.

Chetwoods, meanwhile, has been in touch with Labour mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan’s office about its Well Line vision (Khan is a keen advocate of Oxford Street pedestrianisation). Alma-nac has discussed its Make Good Waterloo studios with Lambeth council.

Future Justice by Maccreanor Lavington and East

The Royal Academy’s initial idea has expanded significantly to talk about the broader issues of re-use and what this can do to mitigate the downsides of London’s rapid redevelopment. This is becoming a serious issue.

Former Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan famously described Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation drive as “selling off the family silver”. These days it feels as if the whole estate has been put on the market: swimming pools, police stations, fire and police stations, town halls — London’s public buildings are available to the highest bidder. An essential aspect of the city’s character — the blend of public buildings, private commerce and housing — is losing some of the vital jigsaw pieces that make our city so wonderfully diverse.

This is not just about austerity but a neoliberal ideology that distrusts the state. It’s an attitude that has bled across the mainstream political spectrum, whether it was Tony Blair’s Private Finance Initiative, which led to many poorly designed “public” buildings that were actually privately owned and leased back (payments that are crippling the NHS), or the sell-offs we are seeing today.

Historic court buildings are becoming hotels and bars; emergency services bases have become apartments. The Post Office Railway is set to become a tourist attraction rather than a useful piece of infrastructure while, in Lambeth itself, a number of branch libraries are becoming fee-paying gyms. Indeed, the Waterloo library is set to close altogether.

“Homogeneity is so dangerous for cities,” says Owen Hopkins, the Royal Academy’s architecture programme curator. “This is about trying to prevent those monocultures. Creative thinking can provide alternatives that tick all the right economic boxes.”

Urban Jigsaw is at the Royal Academy of Arts, W1 (020 7300 8000, royalacademy.org.uk) until May 29

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