Higher education, High Streets, and high hopes for e-sports

Editor, NLQ and New London Weekly

Higher education, High Streets, and high hopes for e-sports

Knowledge Networks in the UK

Knowledge Networks in the UK are alive and well, boosted by key new buildings in the sector that place a major emphasis on flexibility, collaboration, informal learning spaces and greater access to the public.

Those were some of the key take-aways from a showcase of schemes presented in a webinar late last week and kicked off by Penoyre & Prasad’s Michael Fostiropoulos and the PEARL project – Person-Environment-Activity-Research Laboratory. The Dagenham scheme is an innovative project that puts people at the centre of research and which the local authority hopes can turn the site into ‘a force for good’; a coming together of science, technology, research and the creative industries. ‘It’s a big box of tricks’ said Fostiropoulos.

The Life and Mind Building for the University of Oxford, meanwhile, is a reworking of a Sir Leslie Martin building, merging three departments together in a new sustainable construction, said NBBJ’s Darius Umrigar.

‘It is about giving back to the public and engaging in a wider way’, he said. The Zayed Centre for Research into Rare Disease in Children, too, is ‘very much about bringing people together – clinicians, patients, research staff – and the urban context’, said Gavin Henderson, principal director at Stanton Williams.

The scheme – the subject of the latest NLQ building review – is a bench-to-bedside affair that is an opportunity to reengage care and science with the public realm whilst celebrating the often invisible work of scientists and clinicians. Finally, the UCL’s Faculty of Laws’ Bentham House project, said Levitt Bernstein director Matthew Goulcher, was about improving the variety of teaching space, but interested the practice especially because it allowed them to look at a different kind of interaction between students and tutors. ‘One of the successes has been the very different ways people interact in an informal way’, he said.

Building back better on the High Street

Monday brought an intriguing Pecha Kucha session into building back better on the High Street. The session began with McGregor Coxall’s director and urbanism leader Michael Cowdy presenting ‘the revelation of Redchurch Street’, notably with his suggestion that the high street of the future should be about three commanding principles – celebration, congregation and revelation. High Streets could be platforms for cultural celebration, homes to biophilic benefits or learning streets to respond to the changing needs of how people live; conduits for local communities to express their personalities and create memories.

Georgina Day of LB Enfield and Public Practice, moreover, suggested that a radical densification of high streets could create a new ‘hyper-localism’.

The lockdown experience had, said Day, been a ‘collective, lived, breathed experience of the city at the scale of the hyper local’ that had been enriching, not least in the way that people had newly appreciated public realm. Could there be a place for a kind of ‘parasitic and incremental urbanism in this densification’?

While BDP architect Mileni Pamfil looked at the local in a different way in her presentation ‘Hi! Street, inhabiting the in-between’, focusing on the High Street as a ‘supportive urban ecosystem’ that focuses on refurbishing and repurposing existing fabric, Deborah Efemini of Lewisham council showed how an imaginative reimagining of Catford town centre could take the community along with it. But perhaps when it comes to the hard-hit hospitality sector there was also a place for country towns (since rural leisure will likely happen first, releasing pressure on cities) as well as hotels doing short-term adaptations such as ‘sneeze screens’, changed protocols and ventilation and other Covid measures to try to ease economic hardships and welcome customers back, said HKS Architects’ Ben Martins. ‘The chances are we’re going to have to live with contagion in the same way that we will be living with climate change over the coming decades’, he said.

Spaces for sports: the future

E-sports and all things digital was the name of the game on Tuesday as contributors to Spaces for sports: the future looked at how traditional and modern sports venues could help high streets and communities, in part accelerated by Covid-19.

Savills’ Nicky Wightman, who has been energised by the sector’s potential after having arrived in the sector just two years ago said it had implications for schemes from residential to retail to public realm.

Gaming is all around us, she said, and there are some 2.5 billion gaming enthusiasts globally in a youthful, creative sector that is ‘driving innovation’ and covering lots of different forms of real estate. ‘The difference between e-sports and traditional sports is here somebody owns the ball’, she said. There is a new world for stadiums, according to HKS’ Alex Thomas’ presentation, with a new relationship between the physical venue experience and the remote, driven largely by fan behaviour ‘demanding more engaging and authentic experiences’. For every fan inside a Premier League stadium on match day there are on average 330 more who experience that same event remotely. ‘If we’ve learned one thing during lockdown it’s the value of human interaction and our instinctive desire to congregate around shared events’, he said.

Argent’s Heath Harvey had a similar message in terms of his prediction, but that, post-Covid, there are limited possibilities for using sports spaces in de-densified ways.

‘I think that the magic of sports is about rubbing shoulders with fans who share the same passion for a team and wear the same shirt as you do’, he said. ‘I see us going back to stadiums the way they worked six months ago’.

Stadia should, however, become more outward and community facing, concentrating on improving their non-match day offer, as Heath introduced at Wembley with tours. Quintain, indeed, had done much to recognise the ‘magnetic’ effect of stadia like Wembley, creating its community around it. ‘Hats off to them’. The session also included Philip Waind of WGP Architects looking at the future for gyms (‘I’m surprised and a bit disappointed by the government’s slowness to appreciate them’, certainly in terms of their contribution to wellness). People will find ways to share their fitness more as communities, with outdoor gym facilities, parkour, and bouldering likely to see extra emphasis.

David Taylor

Editor, NLQ and New London Weekly

Higher education, High Streets, and high hopes for e-sports

Knowledge Networks in the UK

Building back better on the High Street

Spaces for sports: the future

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