New London Architecture

A year in summary: Industrial & Logistics

Sunday 02 October 2022

Tom Alexander

Director
Aukett Swanke

INDUSTRIAL & LOGISTICS
Tom Alexander, Director, Aukett Swanke
                                                                  
It’s been a potent, illuminating and productive year on this panel with a great collective of experts covering key aspects of this highly active and increasingly innovative industrial industry.

It was a privilege to nudge us through the contributions of each member which were immediately enlightening and quickly drew out exciting areas to discuss, including the fundamental circular tension between the sector’s urban design needs and the demands of London’s people and businesses for delivered goods and services. We further explored the perceptions of what industrial really looks and feels like from B8 and B2 to E Class, which is crucial to its relationship with planning policies, and uniquely the 10 years in 10 months expansion of its already growing volumes during the covid19 pandemic. 

We reviewed international examples for instance Japan being 20 years ahead of the UK in its intensification of industrial buildings. We positively acknowledged that industrial buildings now must match office-type workplaces in terms of the health and well-being of its occupants and visitors, enhancing their envelope, and internal and external public realm design elements. Combined with a need to better integrate with local communities of living, learning and playing activities, these buildings can reveal parts of their internal functions. 
Over the course of further panel gatherings, through presentations and debates, we focused on areas that will define the headlines for informing and hopefully steering the local and citywide governance of London. 
 
Urban Land Use

London needs a no-compromise approach to logistics’ land use strategies, whether independently sited or as co-location. We have the skills to address the challenges with innovation and optimise opportunities for a people-friendly integration. We need to acknowledge some uses are best kept independent suggesting a curation of uses at a city scale. All industrial volumes and their yards can or will need successful blending with local communities whether due to their proximity or the vehicular movement of goods and services. Multi-level is one solution, and both mixed-use and pure industrial options are being explored, with all parties trying to forecast which will prove to be the market’s choice/s. The changing patterns of building use also suggest potential re-uses of redundant spaces in the city, retail and car parks being this year’s focus.
 
Environmental 

Industrial volumes and surfaces offer great passive biodiversity and energy opportunities, as well as residual sharing of those benefits. They can act like biospheres with their natural spatial and structural agility to be a home to all current industrial uses but also to future changes of those uses. The 100-year building approach is inherent in their form enabling a vast array of current uses from high to low tech, but also for transformations to education, life sciences, entertainment, retail, greenhouses and even accommodation. This is a key remit for any new building as we face the climate crisis, and increasingly the sector is responding as investors and occupiers take on their ESG responsibilities.
 
Urban Logistics Network

The choreography of goods and services, namely London’s infrastructure, transport and distribution systems are still relatively poor across London compared with that of people. People are the priority and their safe and healthy flow is critical and mostly improving with each decade. Goods have strategies but they can grate against those people's flows, sometimes dangerously. We can look harder at the existing arteries and their potential timeshare opportunities in cities. The River Thames can tidally float a barge with 24 containers from East to West and back, which is 24 HGV’s off the roads for one round trip, unused subterranean tunnels like the Royal Mail Well-Line could transmit goods, and e-mobility is already very positively disrupting the white van culture. We need to map out the primary arteries and their capacities and analyse the millions of independent business movements between sheds and customers in order to identify the gaps and new safe and efficient flows. We could gather their owners such as the GLA, PLA, TfL and Network Rail with the giants of logistics to take a look at the sometimes chaotic realities and together explore strategies to make the flow better for all parties, whilst inherently reducing the environmental impact.


Tom Alexander

Director
Aukett Swanke


Industrial & Logistics

#NLAIndustrial


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