Shoreditch Park Competition

The design for the new Shoreditch Park seeks to set up a landscape framework within which sit the other element and facilities of the park. The community will be consulted and their opinions will shape how these facilities are placed or how the design develops.

The design balances the need for active recreation, passive recreation and natural places. It also seeks to create a beautiful place within which seasonal change and variation in scale, Space, colour and form are heightened. A retreat from city life where the pace of life can change and dreams be pursued: be it on the football field or sitting on a flowering settee overlooking pink, red and yellow scented roses.

The Design sets up main themes:

A wild and cultivated area where cultivated and cloned fruit trees are grown alongside wild varieties whose seed has been collected from the wild. The drumlin topography also varies and so does the substrate in which the plants are grown. Naturalised perennial planting in grass spread under the trees. A strip of wildflowers runs beside the big lawn. A big raised lawn – grass, sky and space. Woodland spinneys are planted into raised gabion mounds interspersed with multi stem trees underplanted with perennials, grasses and gravels. A colourful row of trees with running track, footpaths, cycleways and timber deck below. On the timber deck sit settees made from hedges and steel fencing with flowering plants strewn along them. There is a long bed of hybrid tea roses cut into the timber deck. Adjacent to the deck is a series of outdoor rooms which hold different facilities: garden, play areas and small sports facilities.

Before the park is built, a series of landscape installations could explore the potential for change and for using the park in different ways, for example:

Make the New North Road into a giant lawn for a weekend, This will allow free flow of people into the park from the other side of the New North Road. Plant a row of plane trees in the middle of the road to slow traffic speed and allow space in the middle of the road for pedestrians to stop.