Norman Grove, London / Henley Halebrown Architects, 2017

An £8m residential scheme for the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, sitting on the edge of a conservation area in East London, comprising a new 500m2 children’s home as well as 1650m2 of mixed-tenure housing delivered across 17 homes and apartments.

As Project Architect on this intricate project, I steered the scheme from the early development of the initial brief with the client and on to a successful planning consent (RIBA 0-3 ≈ LPH1-LPH4), navigating the demands of exacting stakeholders, a specialised end-user and complex planning issues.

The children’s home will provide full-time residential care for children with severe emotional or behavioural difficulties. Children’s homes are becoming increasingly rare as a building-type following a national shift in the approach towards long-term childcare over recent decades, away from purpose-built facilities and towards placements and fostering instead. Norman Grove will be one of very few new-build children’s homes in the UK, and as such the project necessitated the development of the brief from first principles with little guidance from regulation or statute.

The seamless integration of the new children’s home within the immediate residential context was a core aspiration of the project. A series of houses and townhouse-like blocks are proposed, arranged around the perimeter of the site, and which have their own front doors onto adjoining streets. The children’s home extends deeper into the plot to achieve the level of accommodation required, but crucially it will stand as an ordinary house on the street, dignifying this otherwise institutional building type and normalising it’s presence in the surrounding area.