Hadley Property Group has gone live with an extensive and innovative on- and off-line community consultation programme it hopes will help it take on board the views of hard-to-reach communities.

The developer’s director of communications and partnerships Matt Griffiths-Rimmer said it had decided to go beyond a digital engagement platform it created prior to the onset of Covid-19 to add new features and elements to entice more people to comment. The developer wants to hear – and act on – the public’s views on Goodmayes, a mixed use scheme it is in the very early stages of designing with Clarion Housing Group including homes and a new public square on a former Homebase site in the London borough of Redbridge.

“We thought we would need to add to the online polling, videos and animations if we wanted to really engage during lockdown’, Griffiths-Rimmer told New London Weekly. ‘We created an online exhibition space and reimagined the boards as a slide show to make it as user-friendly as possible. Videos, fonts and images needed to be easy to see on smart phones as well as laptops, and then we reached out to the local community with Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.’

In recognition of the fact that not everybody has access to the internet, Hadley also supplemented this approach by aiming at the hard-to-reach groups through other methods.

 

‘We have run SMS engagement too, allowing you to either complete the polls online or send us a message to receive hard copies through the door’, Griffiths-Rimmer went on. ‘It’s been great to reach young and old with digital – we saw this with two of the largest demographics to engage being the over 65 female group, as well as the 20-somethings who were contacted through Instagram’. 

 

Hadley has also geo-tagged the results to make sure that they are relevant. ‘It’s been fascinating to watch the responses coming through in real time’, said Griffiths-Rimmer.  

The consultation for the proposals went live in Redbridge last week, and Hadley has been able to feed those responses directly into the design team to help shape proposals early on in the process. ‘Unsurprisingly, the scheme components which have garnered the most support to date are for publicly-accessible outside open space, the provision of a range of active uses for young adults on the site and our ensuring that there is ground floor space available for local businesses to grow’, he said. ‘One of the most important things about digital consultation is the need to make it quick, easy and positive. If the content is accessible, and the platform user-friendly, then people will engage’.

Stockwool are the architects for the project, Fabrik the landscape / public realm architects, and Hadley expects to submit an application next year.

  

The digital exhibition of proposals is here: https://exhibition.hellogoodmayes.co.uk/locations/good-mayes