Camden youth design community garden on HS2 site

Visualisation of the new gardens and performance space - courtesy LDA Design

Camden youth charity, Fitzrovia Youth in Action (FYA), is helping LDA Design and social enterprise Matt + Fiona to progress plans for a new garden and performance space using a currently unused HS2 site on Hampstead Road in London.

HS2 has opened up access to meanwhile sites around Euston Station and extensive engagement with communities in the area has revealed what local people would most like to see: more play and things for young people to do.

LDA Design and Matt + Fiona have been working with FYA to reimagine the Hampstead Road space, bringing the group’s ideas to life. The process began with drop-in design workshops, followed by Open Iftar and family sessions held on the Regents Park Estate which used large-scale, ink-based drawings to capture ideas. Almost fifty young people have been involved in helping to shape the space, with a core group of 12 young designers.

What emerged was a desire to have a safe, green, multi-purpose space that could be used for performance as well as play.

A pavilion at one end of the gardens will help to give the space focus and identity. A proto-build session for the pavilion with FYA explored potential materials, with reflective surfaces proving most popular.

The site has served as a construction compound and the emerging garden designs aim to reuse as much material as possible, including the concrete strip footings beneath the previous site cabins. These are being retained to help define a new maze of long grasses and more formal parterre gardens leading to the performance pavilion.

LDA Design Director Dafydd Warburton said that it has been fantastic working with Matt + Fiona, FYA and the local community to make sure the gardens are sustainable, recycling and reusing where possible, and that they feature the things local people were most looking for. “This has been such a great community effort and a joyous experience. Now we can’t wait to get these ideas on the ground so that people in an area short of quality green space can start enjoying the gardens and using the pavilion that they so wanted.”

Matthew Springett of Matt + Fiona said that the younger designers care deeply and have taken real ownership of the design, rising to the brief set by the local community to explore ideas for play in original and open-ended ways. Ellie Rudd of FYA said that all of the group working on the project live locally and have come together to do something for their own community.

“We can’t wait for build week and to see the design become reality when it is installed in the green space!”

Nick Jones, Interim Project Client for Euston at HS2 Ltd, said that “while the Government reviews its plans at Euston, we are pleased to have been able to open plots of land to be temporarily used by the local community. It is great that a project developed with local residents is coming to life with sustainability at its core.”

The new gardens will be constructed by HS2’s station construction partner, Mace Dragados joint venture, and are expected to open to the community later this year.