Canal Park Design Guide and Implementation plan

The LCS condition for a Design Guide was intended to set standards, aspirations and a delivery strategy for parkland along the Lee Navigation, ahead of zonal masterplanning of adjacent development platforms.

Canal Park inherits a unique industrial heritage and entrepreneurial community, both transient and permanent, riparian and waterborne. The Design Guide seeks authenticity and connectivity in defining a landscape character of the ‘picturesque' layered over a structure of ‘ecological patchiness' for play and relaxation. The Guide values pre-existing heritage infrastructure and urban ecology, inspired by the science of erdefication and unique specie clone propagation. The Guide evolves from an engagement process that built a network of key individuals, social enterprises, artists, small businesses and academics, to make accessible and underpin the genius loci.

Key innovative aspects of the Design Guide:
1. Action research: Engagement informed the design development in a process of deliberative planning whereby opportunities emerged from conversations and activities on the towpath or on the water.
2. Soil science and landform: A soil resource strategy based manipulation of parkland levels and recycling and blending to ensure a crafted surface, technically buildable, financially deliverable, and the best possible environmental conditions.
3. Plant science and tree specie diversity: Promoting the restoration of black poplar habitat Britain's most endangered native timber tree, a specie in decline for the last 200 years and an Olympic BAP target, through propagation of certified known clones to protect the specie from chance extinction.
4. Biodiversity as play: Creating a rich playable linear landscape of intermittent swales redolent of ditches creating ‘unofficial countryside' a naturalistic open-ended experience of interactive play and discovery
5. Ecological patchiness: A linking towpath edge habitat connecting related ‘rooms' and habitats between bridges characterised by specific picturesque vignettes of scenery.
6. 42â€ asset: Negotiating an innovative approach to large specie tree planting to articulate the parkland through landform manipulation, layering of planting material and integrated traditional management techniques, in close proximity to historic water mains.