8 August 2022 · By Ella Jessel

Councillors have given the go-ahead for a pair of timber-clad buildings for a food growing project in north-east London

Hackney-based Practice Architecture’s plans to expand Hawkwood Plant Nursery in suburban Chingford, run by Community Interest Company (CIC) OrganicLea, were approved by Waltham Forest council last month.

OrganicLea runs a market garden at the 11-acre nursery, a small farm that produces fruit, vegetables, honey and wine to sell locally and is open to the public. It also offers workshops and training courses for volunteers out of its existing facilities, but is running out of room.

To provide more space for the growing business, Practice Architecture has designed two new single-storey buildings with green roofs. The facility will give OrganicLea more space to run its teaching workshops and school projects, as well as providing a new kitchen.

The project is part of the Market Garden City project, supported by the Mayor’s Good Growth Fund, which aims to encourage sustainable food growing and distribution as well as healthy eating and cooking. In 2020, the Chingford Nursery project and Wolves Lane Nursery in Wood Green were awarded £1.2 million by the fund.

Practice Architecture said it had designed the buildings to align with the RIBA’s 2030 Sustainability Challenge and it will employ circular economy principles, using locally sourced natural materials such as Douglas fir, hemp and straw.

Aiming to minimise use of concrete, the architect has chosen for the foundations a combination of compressed rubble and steel screw piles, which can be removed and re-used. The timber structure, cladding and stud framing could be recycled to form mulch or used as a sustainable form of fuel as bio-mass.

According to the practice, the Hawkwood project will demonstrate how the construction industry can adapt to climate change and said it had had conversations with a construction college in Waltham Forest about training opportunities for students.

Founding director Paloma Gormley said projects like Hawkwood offered a rare opportunity for the practice to get ‘intimately involved with the world around us, to dig it, nurture it and have it nurture us’.

She added: ‘They create a sense of belonging and it’s vitally important that we both fight for and invest in them. The project feels particularly relevant at a time when Covid has asked us all to reassess our lives and our priorities. Together with the many urban food and land-based projects around the country they offer a direction towards a different kind of relationship with each other and our environment.’

Marlene Barratt, from OrganicLea added: ‘The design has been led by practices whose approach chimes with OrganicLea’s environmental and social justice principles.

‘We are excited to be working with female-led and BAME-led practices which are challenging traditional architecture industry norms. Their approach involves the use of innovative materials that take environmental sustainability to a new level, and engagement with the community who will be using the buildings, involving clients differently than is usual to create high calibre useable designs.’

The mayoral funding has allowed the CIC to develop full masterplans for both sites, and provides capital for the first phases with further capital being sought to deliver additional phases.

The design work at Wolves Lane, which has not yet been approved, is being led by Practice Architecture and Studio Gil, an east London practice established in 2009.

Also founded in 2009, Practice Architecture’s past projects include Flat House, a low-carbon hempcrete house with materials grown on site in Cambridgeshire and The Yard Theatre, an 120 seat ‘pop-up’ theatre, now 10 years old.

The practice spent the first five years designing and then building each of their projects themselves with the help of friends and volunteers, meaning, they say, they have become ‘specialists in pragmatic yet innovative structural and material approaches’.

Practice Architecture's designs for Hawkwood Nursery in Chingford

Tags Market Garden City Practice Architecture Studio Gil

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