Open City Accelerate

We’ve won Capital and Centric’s competition for St George's Wolverhampton!⁠

Working with our friends Mikhail Riches we’re excited to be co-masterplanning the repair of this historic city district. We’ll also be looking after the design of a glorious new city park, a network of new public spaces and the remaking of several historic streets. While we’re doing that Mikhail Riches will be busy adapting the former Sainsburys building into high performance new homes while other parts of the site will host family housing at a variety of scales. The eponymous church will be re-proposed into community and work spaces surrounded by independent businesses at the heart of the scheme. ⁠
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Find out more here.

Over the weekend we hosted ecology object workshops and practice talks in our office as part of the Open House Festival 2024. Alberto, Ellen and Jessie led the team, we thoroughly enjoyed the conversations, the energy of making and are looking forward to participating again in 2025. Resources can be downloaded here.

This week our clients in LB Redbridge and in LB Lewisham have been awarded £3m and £2.46m respectively for their projects 'Ilford Arrival' and 'Room for Rivers, A Place for People'. ⁠The image above is from a Pilot Engagement 'Dramawalk' with Lewisham Youth Theatre, photography by Jason Baney⁠.

⁠Find out more at the GLA here. BBC press here.

This week we've been in Wolverhampton with Mikhail Riches presenting our ideas for the St George's neighbourhood. We were also fortunate to spend time with the Regeneration Brainery and Wolverhampton Youth Council working through their wishes for the future of the city.

In February 2024, we had the chance to mentor two brilliant students, Humayra and Shamun, as part of the Open City Accelerate Programme. Their project theme was Rituals, translating the spectacular and mundane into celebratory designs for an overlooked site in Dalston.

You can check out their amazing final work of sketches and models at the Accelerate Summer Exhibition from 11-14 July. More info here.

We've published our Impact Report covering the last two years, it can be downloaded here.

The B-Corp framework requires continuous monitoring and improvement, this report includes actions we've taken over the five B Impact areas together with supporting case studies and where we're heading next.

Not one, but two new team members have joined Periscope! ⁠We're happy to welcome Paola Zanotto, a long standing collaborator who now joins us to work on masterplanning and strategic projects. Caitlin Jakusz-Paridy comes to us from Canada via Norway and her work on the afterlife of extraction sites.

In January this year we began working with London Borough of Redbridge to produce a town centre spatial strategy for western Ilford. The project involved synthesising previous work and extending it into a comprehensive strategy for connecting the town centre to the wider borough.⁠

In 2024 a rising tide of noise is engulfing our lives, sometimes sound gives our lives meaning and sometimes it drowns us in over-stimulation. What is good and bad noise and where are our non-human friends in the cacophony? We’d like to find out so this year we’re using our shop front as the transmitter to hear echoes from far beyond the confines of Dalston and the city. ⁠

Join us as we respond to nature and place via performances, installations and sonic conversations at Microscope. Over the coming weeks and months we’ll be hosting a series of events, please check back soon or look at the Eventbrite link here.

The last few years have seen much discussion over how fundamentally the world of work has changed following COVID-19, unfortunately this talk doesn't seem to have resulted in significant impact to core working practices. In light of this and the increased focus of younger professionals on quality of life over burn-out we thought that we might try changing how Periscope works. For seven months between September 2023 and March 2024 Periscope ran a four-day-week trial, the results can be downloaded here.

Earlier this year Alberto and Rebecca joined Cambridge City Council, Mission Street and Hawkins Brown to co-design and engage with KS2 students at The Spinney Primary School in Cherry Hinton. The outcomes of the sessions will be included in the adjacent innovation district which is due to commence on site next year.

The Gurnell Leisure Centre & Parklands in LB Ealing has been submitted for planning approval. Periscope has led the design of the enhanced parkland which includes climate-resilient plantings, significant biodiversity enhancements, a new urban woodland, river and surface water attenuation components together with new play areas, a new skatepark and pump track.

Find out more here.

The strategic infrastructure works at Meridian Water have won a Pineapple Future Public Realm award. Together Brooks Park and Edmonton Marshes will be the largest parks delivered in the Lea Valley since the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in 2012. Designed in collaboration with Enfield Council and ARUP both parks and the wider infrastructure works have now started construction and are due to complete in 2025.

Our collaboration with Al-Jawad Pike in east Hackney has won an RIBA London Award and been shortlisted for the RIBA Stirling Prize.

Find out more here or on our project page.

In April we were pleased to promote Rebecca Faulkner to Senior Part II Architectural Assistant. Since joining Periscope Rebecca has worked across adaptive reuse in Lewes, park design in Brent and Ealing together with engagement in many communities. She has co-lead our work with RIBA Architecture Ambassadors and Open City Accelerate plus for two straight years she held the reigns on The Phoenix Design Code.

We look forward to her continuing to think sensitively and make beautifully at many scales.⁠

Our co-designed Gascoigne Road improvement project for BeFirst has been submitted for planning. The project refits the street with SuDs, widens payments, slows traffic and provides more green and play space for residents.

Find out more here.

Tom Kendall's Exhibition 'To Hear the Hrumph of the Big Hairy Thing' has opened in Microscope. The show contains his drawings made by walking in landscape, find out more here.

How do you integrate the terminus of HS2, deliver 10,000 homes + over 300,000sqm of workspace while respecting Park Royal (the largest industrial area in London) and balance the needs of humans and non-humans? That’s the conundrum we’ve been helping Old Oak Park Royal Development Corporation with for the past couple of years.⁠

In 2024 we reconvened with Gort Scott, Allies & Morrison and JA Projects to refine the spatial principles for Old Oak West.

Earth to Table has opened in Microscope. Centred around our work at Stockpile Garden the exhibition explores the collaboration between soil and making through work by Periscope, Kirsty Badenoch and James Hepper. Find out more here.

Our three-year collaboration with Human Nature and some of the UK’s brightest Architects, Engineers and designers came to fruition yesterday as the South Downs National Park Planning Committee granted unanimous approval for The Phoenix masterplan, including the detail of the first phase.

It has been a long and winding road that started at the tail end of the pandemic requiring navigation of the necessary protections afforded to the National Park, the local historic context, contamination, flooding and viability to name but a few. The result really does point the way to a, more equitable, climate positive and regenerative future. We really can live better.