Benjamin Turner

Towards a New Suburbia

Where Will We Go?

A generation has been priced out of London's central boroughs by rising house prices. According to Savills, London requires 50,000 homes a year to address its shortfall, equivalent to 18 Olympic Villages or 25 Barbican Estates.

Intended as a counter proposal to current trends in suburban housing, the proposal is strategically situated in Rainham, on the inner edge of the Metropolitan Green Belt, along the line identified in the 1940s as London’s outer limit. The Green Belt has played a key role in inflating the land values of the city it constrains, contributing to the creation of a lost generation unable to access urban life in the long term.

At a strategic curve in the river Thames, and boasting dramatic views of the London skyline, the project proposes an urban enclave amidst the marshes, a collaged urbanism which redeploys London's increasingly gentrified or destroyed Brutalist heritage in the making of a new high-density community, using the cultural value of our nearly-recent architectural heritage to build a new urbanity on the edge of a prescribed rural.