Transcript: Accordia video

Peter Carter:
You know, it just instantly struck us that we could do something really very interesting with the landscape structure of this place.

Janet Earl:
The windows are huge and the light coming into it is absolutely magical.

Unidentified male:
Very high-quality materials, quite expensive materials but used in a very simple way.

[Music]

Peter Studdert:
Well it was a very important site for the City Council because it was one of the few quite large urban sites that we had available in the 1990s. And so, it was owned by the government, it was a site that we wanted to bring forward fairly quickly.

Peter Carter:
But behind everything was the enormous advantage that this site had naturally in the first place of having three strong corridors of trees on the eastern boundary, the western boundary and up the centre of the site and those, I think, have also helped frame the development as a whole and give it a green and pleasant feel.

Peter Studdert:
He did a planning brief for the site in the late 1990s that set out our aspirations for the site. I mean, the basic deal was that we’d allow new office buildings to be built in one corner of the site, so all the civil servants would be re-housed satisfactorily in the office and that would free up about three-quarters to seven-eighths of the site for housing. We made it quite clear that the draft layout that they had submitted with the outline was acceptable insofar as it established the amount of housing that could be satisfactorily put on the site, but we left them in… under no illusions that we actually wanted something an awful lot more imaginative when they came back at reserve matter stage.

Peter Carter:
We didn’t want prestige [?]. This was the best site in Cambridge and it had to be worthy of the city as it was.

Chris Crook:
It became further clear to us that they felt that due to the importance of the site in the city - its location and everything else, that perhaps we would like to consider involvement with so-called signature architects.

Peter Carter:
When they came forward with the reserve matter submission, they had already engaged external architects rather than their internal architects.

Chris Crook:
And that’s how we first came into contact with Feilden Clegg Bradley and in particular, Keith Bradley. He was very gracious with his approach and he said that in view of the importance of the site and its strategic significance to the city of Cambridge, he felt that certain key buildings ought perhaps to be undertaken in a different design hand.

Keith Bradley:
Fairly earlier on, we said to Kunsha [?], well this is nearly 400 housing units on this site and we thought that actually a degree of subtle variety required. I mean, most districts of cities and towns don’t have one hand designing that number of homes.

Chris Crook:
And that’s how we then met with Alison Brooks and Richard Lavington. And I thought that was a tremendously important step in forging what has become a successful relationship.

Keith Bradley:
Chris Crook did say to me at one point and I hope he won’t mind me saying this, that, mm, I’m not sure, one architect is bad enough, but three.

Chris Crook:
I said, I don’t mind having three firms of architects as long as there’s only one backside to kick and that’s yours.

[Pause]

Chris Crook:
This was probably the most significant degree of consultation we’ve ever undertaken with a relatively small, in terms of numbers, application.

Keith Bradley:
We had to work strictly within a budget, we were working for a volume-house builder who had their certain margins to achieve. We were working under a design and build contract.

Chris Crook:
And this was a scheme which was bought speculatively, it was designed to make a profit, otherwise if we didn’t make a profit, it wasn’t going to be accepted by my board.

Richard Lavington:
I think as a planning process it was extremely good, there was a lot of pre-application discussion with the local authority who were very engaged in the project.

Peter Studdert:
We were wanting something which had a, sort of, a clarity of form but also a compactness and a density, allowing then the landscape also to weave through the scheme.

Keith Bradley:
The gridded nature of the streets, the right-angle corners, the tight site lines. All of those things were really, sort of, negotiated through at great length.

Andrew Grant:
In a way it started from a diagram that Keith Bradley did which is this little, sort of, cartoon, which described how a person would live on this site. It was this little hierarchy of spaces from the personal inside to the outside and to the public which was the structure really for the whole process.

Unidentified male:
But our whole case was actually around the idea of very slow car movements and therefore, you know, approaches up to junctions and things where you could actually, where, if you couldn’t quite see, actually that was a positive thing rather than a negative thing, and the whole idea of more pedestrian and cycle-dominated environment.

Peter Studdert:
We very much supported the architect’s view, that to keep, I think it’s about six metres face-to-face, that if… that to have a narrow mew is actually discourage people than parking within the mews. People had to put their cars in the spaces where they should be and it became a self-policing approach.

Keith Bradley:
Well, it’s very important that we have the aspect of shared space and community, that that can only happen in our minds by actually having a strong sense of privacy as well. So the arrangement of the homes are around a series of internal courtyards and terraces and balconies and roof gardens.

Richard Lavington:
One of the advantages I think that a lot of the houses on this site have, is that a lot of the rooms within the dwelling connect to the range of different outside spaces. So because there’re outside spaces, courtyards at ground level, terraces first floor level, you know, a patio right up at the roof level, there’s a lot of different rooms, bedroom, living spaces, studio at the back in case some of these houses, kitchen-dining space all connect to an outside space.

Keith Bradley:
Giving that attention in detail and in quality, I think, is something that’s been very close to our hearts over a number of years and the Accordia Project, I think, gave us the opportunity really to show how that can be done on a very special and unique site.

Wayne Hemingway:
Sometimes you walk into a development and you can clearly feel that this is a great place to live and it’s been well thought out, but how do you quantify that?

Dominic Church:
What makes Accordia work so well is a mix of many different elements, partly to do with the location and partly to do with the actual design of the scheme. And if we want to be able to understand the factors that make it work so well, and replicate them elsewhere, we have to be able to unpack them and break them down and look at them individually.

Dominic Church:
Building for Life provides a framework for measuring the strengths of the new development, either at the preplanning stage or when it’s completed post construction.

David Birkbeck:
I think the reason for using Building for Life in a planning process is it gives an officer a chance to look at a scheme and judge whether it’s mean-spirited.

Yolande Barnes:
It holds fundamental questions that every developer should be asking from the outset of a scheme.

David Birkbeck:
Now why would you reject a planning application on the basis you don’t like the architecture? That’s a crazy way to go because our view about things like that will change every decade. But would it be fair to reject a planning application on the grounds it was mean-spirited? I think it would be fair to do that in every year of every decade.

Dominic Church:
So Accordia was the highest scoring scheme against the Building for Life criteria that we’ve seen to date and so it really set a benchmark. We are very keen to see many more developments which aspire to this high standard, but in order to be able to do that, you really need to understand what makes this development work.

[Music]

Janet Earl:
We can easily cycle to the school my children go to and there are a lot of schools.

Dominic Church:
From the point of view of transport connections, it’s ideally located. It’s also quite close to the town centre of Cambridge, so you’ve got all the kind of facilities that you would expect within easy reach.

[Music]

Mark Bailey:
There’s huge variety on the site and the needs of the local community, I think, are being well served. There is a wide range from one-bedroom apartments, two-bedroom apartments, three and four-bedroom houses. So there’s a huge spectrum and therefore there’s a huge diversity of people that have moved into and complement the scheme.

[Music]

Peter Carter:
In terms of the affordable housing within the city, there was within the 1996 Cambridge local plan, the requirement for 30% provision.

Jerry Harkness:
One of the things we liked about the scheme when we first saw it, was that it was providing affordable housing in a part of Cambridge where there isn’t any. So we felt that was good because it was bringing a mixed community to what is quite an expensive piece of real estate.

Mark Bailey:
This is probably the best scheme I’ve ever seen, ever been involved in, that integrates affordable housing with private housing. You don’t drive through the scheme and it’s not clearly visible where the affordable housing is.

Nigel Harris:
I think that’s a very good thing. It makes the community far more interesting; just very nice to have this complete cross-section of the community there.

[Music]

Nigel Harris:
We are very close to the station; ten minutes walk to the mainline station, 45 from Kings Cross on the express, so that’s very much a plus feature. And that was another big selling point as far as we were concerned.

Janet Earl:
We’ve got busses, we very, very rarely use the car here because we can walk or cycle to town. And certainly, the children cycle to everything they need to do, like swimming lessons or Brownies or, you know, school. [Laugh]

Dominic Church:
So what you find at Accordia, is that a design includes a sustainable urban drainage system, it includes green roofs which are very useful in managing both the water management but also the temperature of the home. And then also the homes are built to quite high insulation standards.

David Birkbeck:
What Accordia has is an alternative form of low-energy strategy. It uses a series of materials which I genuinely believe you probably never ever have to do the classic, sort of, overhaul on it, you might have to do with a lot of buildings every 10, 15, 25 years.

Peter Carter:
Before development commenced, we had no policy within our local plan about sustainability in a very fixed form. The 1996 local plan came through at a time when the emphasis that there is now upon sustainability wasn’t as focused certainly as it has become in more recent years.

Dominic Church:
I think for new development we would really have to continue to raise our aspirations there and look to a very high level of performance.

[Music]

Peter Studdert:
The case officer for the planning application actually went over at his own expense to Holland to actually see this brick on site to check out that it would be acceptable in a Cambridge context. So we were looking for compatibility with the Cambridge texture, through use of materials, but very much looking for something that was contemporary in its style.

Richard Lavington:
The range of house types within the project is one of its real strengths and I think the strength of the master plan is it called for this range of different typologies for living.

[Music]

Chris Crook:
The concept of living in the garden is one that you’re very conscious of. If we could, you know, go into some of the houses now, you would be on a bright sunny day like today realise that you’ve got garden views front, back and side.

David Birkbeck:
The classic thing would have been save money on the foundations, rip the trees down. Here they’ve actually used those trees as a privacy screen and in order to essentially create an attractive environment where they can sell.

Yolande Barnes:
The use of the land, the use of the trees, the planting, the landscaping, is absolutely key to the success of this place.

[Music]

Janet Earl:
Well I think it stands out because it’s so clean looking, I think it’s very, very distinctive. It’s used traditional materials but in a modern building.

Andrew Grant:
From a landscape point of view, you get this very, very interesting hierarchy of outdoor space that goes from the home, which includes balconies, outdoor courtyards, terraces, coming out into the… over the mews streets, which is shared with the local people or the shared, sort of, garden space, is what we call the street gardens.

Nigel Harris:
You’re flicking through a magazine somewhere and you see a little thumbnail picture of a building. Not my house but a building, and you think, ooh, that’s one of the houses on our development – it’s instantly recognisable.

[Music]

Janet Earl:
The layout is very easy to read.

Dominic Church:
Because of the specific character of the spaces that they’ve created, so you’ve got tree-lined avenues, you’ve got play spaces, you’ve got, sort of, green spaces bounded by townhouses. They’re very distinctive so it means it’s easy to find your way, because you remember those spaces and you don’t need lots of signposts to help you find your way.

[Music]

Dominic Church:
You’ve got a very clear structure, it’s very easy in terms of finding your way but it’s also very easy to identify how those spaces work.

Richard Lavington:
The key idea was, sort of, contemporary reinterpretation of the terraced house. It has this pedestrian space to the front with the road separated by an avenue of trees and then to the rear there’s a mews where there’s a garage, which is very much like in a way, a small version of the large London houses or actually Cambridge houses that you find nearby.

Chris Crook:
The private gardens have a very important role to play in that they… there’s… you would feel uncomfortable if you just wanted to go through there. You would feel that you’re intruding on someone’s private area. Whereas you feel much more encouraged about coming onto the space that we’re on at the moment.

[Music]

Jerry Harkness:
They’ve managed to get essentially an arrangement where you can drive into the scheme, but when you access the scheme, there’s no reason for you to, sort of, drive at any, kind of, speed, there’re lots of sharp right angle turns as you turn into one of the mews streets or as you take into one of the secondary streets.

Andrew Grant:
What we wanted to do at very particular places, was to actually blur the boundaries between what’s a vehicular route and what’s a pedestrian route, just to, sort of, add a sense of surprise really. What’s happening, I’m not familiar with this and, you know, get everybody just to calm down and think what’s going on.

Nigel Harris:
The roads are kept small, little mews lanes and things like that and I think that’s the way to treat it. You don’t want to make the roads big, keep them small and feature the human things like the buildings and the gardens.

[Music]

Janet Earl:
Well, we’ve got… I suppose it’s a carport but it’s within the house. I don’t know what it’s technically termed, which as far as we’re concerned works extremely well. And all the houses have garages or assigned parking.

Dominic Church:
They’ve got some car parking on the street as well, so they’ve thought of a mix of different ways of providing adequate car parking. And what that means is that as you walk around Accordia, you can enjoy the spaces that you are walking through. Yes, there’s enough space for car parking but it doesn’t completely take over.

[Music]

Andrew Grant:
One of the big, interesting challenges we had was to try and see how we could rediscover a, sort of, more, sort of, homely relationship between vehicles and pedestrians and cyclists on the site, so we could calm everything down and make some of the streets feel very safe for all the users.

Janet Earl:
The streets are mostly free of vehicles and the children can play in them, which they do, because they’ve all got skateboards and scooters and bikes, you know, so it’s excellent.

[Music]

Keith Bradley:
One of the constraints that we were given is that there was only, sort of, one entrance and exit from the site, in terms of the traffic movement, in terms of highways.

Janet Earl:
There’s one main entrance to the site, but if you’re walking or on bicycles, there are other ways of getting in and out.

Keith Bradley:
Ideally, we would have loved to have been able to connect up the central street that we made through the scheme, out the other end, so that it really felt like a properly connected piece of neighbourhood.

[Music]

Nigel Harris:
There is enough overlooking the areas where most people would walk. It does have this secure feeling, there’s an inbuilt, sort of, neighbourhood watch about the way the buildings have been sited and so on.

David Birkbeck:
You have so many people here, that mean that these pedestrian routes will also be quite active and that is one reason why they’ll be safe.

[Music]

Janet Earl:
The children certainly play outside. In the summer quite a lot of people who live along this row and around the corner go and, sort of, lie outside and, you know, take a picnic out and children have parties outside. Even teenagers have had barbeque parties out there. [Laugh]

Mark Bailey:
There is a management company in place and that management company represents the residents.

Nigel Harris:
The communal gardens, we all… we form a company when the development’s finished and we all have a, sort of, a fiftieth share in the communal gardens, so it’s our responsibility to pay for the maintenance of the gardens. Some of the other houses look out onto gardens which can be used communally which are going to be handed over to the Council and will be maintained by the City Council, so they won’t have to pay for the maintenance of theirs.

[Music]

Dominic Church:
Accordia was awarded the Sterling Prize, which, I think, is just an expression of the high-quality architecture that you find here, but, I think, that’s not just about how the homes look, it’s also about how they’re laid out internally.

Janet Earl:
Each floor – the ground floor, the first floor and the second floor, has an outdoor space attached to it, so they’ve got decks upstairs and then downstairs we’ve got this courtyard which, in the summer, they’ve all got big doors that open, so you can, sort of, incorporate your outside space into your inside space [laugh], if you see what I mean.

Richard Lavington:
Ultimately, good architecture in terms of housing is creating places that people want to live, not just now but in the future.

[Music]

Keith Bradley:
I think one thing that does make for communities, is some sort of longevity of residents, in terms of actually being able to stay in a place rather than they say they feel that they have to move because actually they can’t do… they can’t adapt their home.

Richard Lavington:
We were designing a series of rooms within the house which, you know, are laid out in a certain way now but may change the way they’re used in the future. There are these, sort of, spaces above the garage which we imagined might be a studio, might be a home office, might be a teenager’s bedroom, it might be somewhere for guests to stay. There are also, sort of, the way that bedrooms are organised, there’s possibilities of having your main bedroom on the top floor, or the middle floor or, you know, organising those things in different ways, depending on how you want to live.

[Music]

Mark Bailey:
These houses predominantly are brick and block, so they’re traditional construction, some of the larger buildings have concrete frame. We do have some timber frame but to be fair that was more of a result of the logistics and the ability to build, rather than a choice of developing timber frame products. I wouldn’t say that Accordia is cutting-edge technology. It’s actually contemporary design using traditional methods. It has good insulation values, so for the building regs that it was designed to, it far exceeds the building regulations that it was designed to. But building regs move on, codes move on significantly.

[Music]

Dominic Church:
Well at the time that it was conceived and then built, Accordia did outperform the building regulations that were relevant at the time.

Nigel Harris:
I mean, I’ve looked at the construction of the house and it appears to be very well insulated and all that sort of thing and we’ve got all the very latest energy-saving devices. It’s supposed to cost only about £400 a year to heat, which is pretty good for a house that’s well over 2,000 square feet in floor area. So provided we haven’t been [laugh] led down the garden path about that, I think it does appear to be very efficient and to have a low carbon footprint.

[Music]

Wayne Hemingway:
You only have to look at the National Housing audit done by CABE to show that, you know, just about 80% of all housing built in the last five or seven years or whatever it was, is… was classed as poor or mediocre and 27 or was it 29% shouldn’t have got planning permission. Well, that’s criminal, it’s absolutely terrible and Building for Life can get you around that.

Andrew Grant:
Where we live, where we, you know, sort of, come home to every day, that’s our, sort of, our reference point for the rest of our lives really and to me there’s nothing more important than that.

Peter Carter:
I think that what has been done at Accordia can be achieved elsewhere without any question. I think in some other places one might have to be much more demanding in terms of quality of landscaping that one introduces at the outset.

Chris Crook:
These are things which add value, they make life worth living. If you can demonstrate that as part of the sales and marketing process when you’re trying to sell off plan on a dusty construction site. [Laugh]

Yolande Barnes:
Consequently, we’ve got a situation where, if you don’t do this, you’re in jeopardy; you’re jeopardising the future for your scheme and the future arguably of your enterprise. So there’s real commercial value in this and equally, a commercial danger if we don’t do it.

Keith Bradley:
Most architects tend to be, sort of, focused on special buildings, you know, whether it’s the schools or the arts and cultural buildings or the, sort of, the slightly one-offs that actually exist. I think that what we need to give more attention to, is actually the ordinary stuff of our cities and towns.

[Music]