Leading 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 site on Hampstead Road. 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. At least 48 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.”
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.
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