Reigate Close, Halewood
While some projects are blessed by context-rich backstories, strong links to History or some flamboyant architectural agenda, this one is driven mainly by commercial reality and shares its leitmotif with many similar suburban schemes. The creation of housing for profit making.
The ambition of a developer recycling a failed social club site in order to generate more housing is not solely a numbers exercise. Regeneration is, of course, not simply a game of Monopoly. In order to sell at the asking price, houses need to appeal to the intended audience.
“How do you create a sense of place using a kit of well-engineered house types?”
The area lies at the junction of two districts with strikingly different postcode ratings when it comes to house hunting. The site itself is located behind a tall row of shops, seemingly turning its back on the new development. Post-war semis and low-rise apartment blocks are the prevalent types in these suburbs, interspersed by other, equally severe looking rows of shops and the odd pub. Streets around here have a masterplanned quality, everywhere seems part of an estate, part of one of the successive expansions of the original village centres.
In contexts like these, where the project is part of the rule and not the exception, perhaps the better question to ask is not: how do you create a sense of place, but rather: how how do you cultivate the one that is already there?