Listen: Vincent Lacovara on Croydon
Near the end of 2015, the Government backed Croydon Council’s plans to compulsorily purchase the land needed for the £1bn redevelopment of the Whitgift Shopping Centre in the heart of the town. This huge development is a key part of the reinvention and reinvigoration of Croydon. Very many years in the planning, it is now finally coming to fruition through myriad projects and initiatives, according to Vincent Lacovara. Vincent Lacovara was a co-founder of architecture design and research agency AOC, and since 2003 has been working with Croydon Council, where he is now the placemaking team leader
In 1993, Blueprint published a supplement covering the Architecture Foundation and Croydon Council's 'Croydon the Future' project. Shown in a tent outside the Fairfield Halls designed by Future Systems, the project featured the work of 14 key architects of the day who had been invited to come up with bold, but implementable, ideas to transform central Croydon.
By the early Nineties, people were seeing that Croydon was suffering the consequences of its post-war remodelling, combined with the knock-on effects of competition from Canary Wharf, M25 business parks and the alternatives to the once unique Whitgift Shopping Centre. The project captured imaginations, including mine -- I was a student at a Croydon secondary school at the time.
Branson Coates proposed exotic suburban outposts for central London's cultural institutions atop Croydon's seven car parks and Ian Ritchie imagined replacing some of Croydon's Alphaville-esque tower blocks with picturesque boating lakes.
The problem was that although the stated intention was to generate 'practical and affordable' projects that could be put into practice, nothing very tangible resulted at all. It contributed to what until recently was a perception -- and a frustration for its communities -- that Croydon was a place that was very good at coming up with big, visionary plans and ideas, but not so good at making them happen.
But, as anyone who has been through East Croydon station or had an eye on development news recently might have noticed, things are definitely 'happening' in Croydon now. So, what has changed?
From around 2009, following the completion of Will Alsop's 2007 Third City, work progressed on a series of coordinated, technical masterplans. This phase of work built on the dreaming of previous visioning work, but added a focused and determined intention to turn these concepts into robust, collaboratively produced, radically pragmatic plans.
The masterplans and Opportunity Area Planning Framework (OAPF), in turn, generated the Connected Croydon public realm programme, which drew public realm components from each of the masterplans and developed them in more detail. The adoption of Croydon Local Plan, Infrastructure Delivery Plan and the Community Infrastructure Levy Charging Schedule completed the full set of joined-up planning documents.
These policies and strategies, prepared during the recession, provide an important backdrop of strategic clarity, confidence and certainty for developers, investors, businesses and the community -- a basis on which to secure external funding from the Greater London Authority, Transport for London, and others, and a springboard for projects.
They set the framework for Croydon's evolution as a place that can accommodate significant growth in the next 20 years, including some 9,000 new homes in the central area, maintaining and supporting the best of what is already there, and complementing this with new developments and projects to enable a thriving, successful, resilient, mixed-use city.
As the economy has picked up and investment has been secured, the first phase of projects is being built. Designed by teams including We Made That, Hassell, East and John McAslan + Partners, these projects connect the city and help start to make a more convivial and characterful public realm. Meanwhile, Stanhope Schroder's Ruskin Square development is on site, with buildings by AHMM and Shedkm set in a Ruskinian landscape devised by muf architecture/art. Work on the second Boxpark, designed by BDP, is underway and due to open this summer.
The Croydon Partnership's outline planning proposals for the Whitgift Centre, by Allies and Morrison and scheduled to open in 2020, will also help unlock the large urban block at the heart of central Croydon. The plans show residential towers above a new shopping centre arranged around a clear network of new permeable streets, designed to knit into the wider set of public-realm connections and development proposals that are now coming forward around it.
But for all the understandable excitement around these big, high-profile projects, it is the growing number of smaller, bottom-up initiatives -- many of which make use of the spaces and opportunities created by the large developments -- that really define the spirit and soul of the emerging Croydon.
Croydon Tech City is nurturing a major cluster of tech start-ups; initiatives like RISE Gallery and Turf Projects are creating new galleries and spaces for art practice in retailing, and communities are reinterpreting some of Croydon's more marginal and underused spaces with enterprises of their own, from Ally McKinlay's pop-up saffron farm to Saif Bonar's Matthews Yard unique combination of co-working space, theatre, gallery and cafe.
For me, some 22 years on from that Blueprint supplement, it is these projects that represent not only a very exciting Croydon present, but a tantalisingly real future.
