As a consultant, we get to work on all sorts of projects, but actually seeing things built can be a bit of a hit and miss affair. It is therefore with joy, we are able to revisit a project we delivered at the beginning of last year.

The London Borough of Brent had been rolling out a series of “school streets” which essentially designate sections of street outside schools such as Our Lady of Grace Catholic Infant and Nursery School on Dollis Hill Avenue (above) and Leopold School on Hawkshead Road (below) as pedestrian and cycle zones for a short time in the morning and afternoon to make it safer for children and parents/ carers in the area outside and in some cases, giving additional walking space.

Brent wanted to go a little further and so MP Smarter Travel was engaged to develop and deliver engagement with four schools in the borough under the “Green and Healthy School Streets” programme to build on the traffic management work to add greenery, new trees, rain gardens, seating and cycle parking to activate the spaces outside the schools by taking part of the carriageway that might have been used for car parking (often informally). The work was ultimately funded by the Mayor of London.

We were engaged by MP Smarter travel to provide technical support in designing the rain gardens (above) to feasibility stage along with looking at all of the tricky kerbs, gradients and drainage involved, with One Environments brought in to provide specialist landscape advice on the right type of planting for the project. Our project team used feedback from the schools to tailor the feasibility work to each school and the feasibility designs went through an independent design review process. The council then developed the designs to the detailed design stage and procured construction.

After hearing that work was underway, we couldn’t resist to go and see how things were turning out. At Our Lady of Grace Catholic Infant and Nursery School (above) a whole section of informal car parking had been replaced with lush rain gardens and new trees. Ugly pedestrian guardrail had been removed to give walking space back to people and some cycle parking hoops had been added in line with our recommendations. Seating is an often overlooked aspect of street design and it was lovely to see our original idea for some fairly utilitarian seating improved with timber cubes with colourways that reflected the feedback from the school children during MP Smarter Travel’s engagement work.

Although a little smaller, the work at Leopold School was looking perfectly formed (above) with planting squeezed in either side of an existing crossing point and some new cycle parking added. We especially liked the shades of colour on the seating boxes which complemented the red of the school’s wall.

The designs we developed had to deliver to a tight budget which we kept under review in a costing model. However as is often the case, a fair bit of that money is hidden away in the engineering (drainage and kerbs in this case), but we are perfectly happy with that because it then enables transformations such as those achieved by this project where boring and unproductive asphalt is replaced with something the children had a hand in developing and which hopefully has inspired them for the future.

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