No more dark corners: the regeneration team focusing on outdoor space

Regenerating Friary Park Estate

I meet the team behind the regeneration of the Friary Park Estate in By Max, a lively modern coffee shop just outside Acton Main Line Station. They tell me proudly that owner Max is a local resident who was given a grant to set up his coffee shop in the base of the one of the new blocks of flats on the estate.  

Peabody started regenerating the estate in 2014, with Mount Anvil joining the project in 2019. 

When Inside Housing visits the site in September, the first phase of the project has been completed, during which 135 affordable homes were built. Of these homes, 85 were provided to residents from the original estate and 50 were allocated to households on Ealing Council’s housing waiting list. The third phase of the regeneration was granted planning permission in April this year.

The original estate was a network of cul-de-sacs of low-rise flats and terraced homes. It was built in the late 1980s for private sale, but was purchased by Ealing Family Housing Association (now Peabody) in 1988 to provide social housing. Around a third of the original estate remains today, alongside the newly finished homes and the construction sites for stages two and three of the regeneration. The finished development will provide a total of 1,345 homes, 470 of which will be affordable. 

I’m led from Max’s coffee shop, past an Asda, along the promenade connecting the flats and through to the shared garden, where I sit down with the team in the site office to discuss the partners’ approach to this redevelopment.

“What’s been really important for us is not just the inside of Friary, but how what we’re doing will have that ripple effect beyond our homes and to the wider area,” says Serena Horgan, head of development delivery at Peabody.

The route the team took me through is a key part of their design process. “[It] maps a journey of a resident that lives at Friary. They come out of the Elizabeth Line Station, stop by By Max, and walk through the green space to an event happening in the new community facility,” Ms Horgan explains.

“So, for us, it’s being able to visualise more than just the existing place, and that’s exactly what real regen should be. It should be spilling beyond your plot of land.”

The team thought carefully about the choice of businesses in the ground-floor space – they chose Asda based on what would be suitable for Peabody’s affordable housing residents and rejected applications from chain cafes in favour of the resident-run coffee shop. 

“Doing that project with By Max, and how he’s used that outdoor space, is significant,” Ms Horgan says. “[The shop is] quite lively and buzzy, so it makes a real change to that corner.”

Resident engagement

All this is part of Peabody and Mount Anvil’s “listening-first” approach. Since the project’s inception, there has been a resident steering group for original residents of the estate to voice opinions and feedback on designs. For instance, testing ideas for the parking strategy and options for the kitchens in their flats. 

The resident group can also provide feedback during monthly meetings and the more than 400 community events organised by the team. 

“The residents, they are ultimately number one – they’re who we’re delivering for,” says Kieran Jones, senior site manager for Friary Park at Mount Anvil. “I’ve been here for nearly three years. We know the residents; they know us. They can speak to us. They can call us.”

Mount Anvil and Peabody also established an independent advisory board. This is a group of industry experts, separate to Mount Anvil and Peabody, who hold meetings with residents.

“It’s a case of residents being in a safe space,” Ms Horgan explains. “They might not necessarily want to always say to myself or [the site manager or construction director that] they ‘weren’t happy with X, so we think you could do this better’. Whereas in that environment, speaking in those [independent advisory board] meetings, I think is a good opportunity to then voice concerns externally, that are then fed back to us in a private format.”

Tenure-blind design

Another aspect of the partners’ approach is ‘tenure-blind’ design. All the buildings have been designed in the same style, so externally the affordable housing is indistinguishable from the private market homes. 

Ms Horgan is keen for private residents to also join the steering group. “Sometimes you can be focused on your existing community, which is obviously paramount for us, but we want to have that natural overlap with the new residents that come through,” she says. “We want [the steering group] to be representative of what Friary will be like in the end, because it will be a very mixed-tenure community.”

This tenure-blind approach extends to the outdoor spaces. There are shared roof terraces, gardens and multi-use sports pitches, which can be accessed by both private and affordable housing tenants. There are some facilities within the homes for private market tenants, such as a gym and concierge, but affordable housing residents can choose to opt in for these facilities. 

“That’s a basic design principle of ours. We don’t discriminate. We don’t put up any artificial or physical barriers as to who can access it,” says Tom Beardmore, social value and communications director at Mount Anvil.

It is a topic that has sparked controversy in recent years, with examples hitting the press of developments where children from affordable homes in a development were not allowed to use the play area designated for private residents. 

A survey carried out by charity Save the Children found that only 27% of children play regularly outside their homes, compared with 71% in their grandparents’ generation. Research from the Association of Play Industries in 2022 revealed that children in London have access to almost five times fewer public playgrounds than children in Scotland. 

At Friary Park, young people from the estate were involved to share ideas about the design of the new play space, and Mount Anvil has partnered with the charity Make Space for Girls. It also worked with consultant Light Follows Behaviour on lighting outdoor spaces in an inviting way and removed dark corners that might make people feel unsafe and encourage anti-social behaviour.