Council and democracy

London's third city... a refreshing vision for Croydon

It's a belief shared by many local people who attended a series of workshops earlier in the year and helped him devise a 20+ year vision to propel western Europe's largest town towards realising its undoubted potential.

Alsop's personal vision will be presented in public for the first time to an invited audience in Croydon Clocktower on Tuesday 13 November*. 

The vision features a number of the bold and dynamic buildings for which the award-winning architect is renowned.  However, it is his proposals for Croydon's public realm that have excited early interest among those in the council who commissioned Alsop to help formulate the town centre's new statutory plan. He has produced imaginative but realisable proposals both to revive Croydon's water front and also to create an appealing green link around the town.  Where currently Croydon's greenery is sparse and isolated, Alsop has identified an opportunity to partly encircle the town with tree-lined walks which allow direct connections to the significant parks that surround it and which would be interspersed with as much of the River Wandle as can be unearthed.

Prompted by concepts emerging from the workshops Alsop - himself once a resident of Croydon - has also challenged the need for maintaining the main north - south road as a six lane highway bisecting the town.  Removing much of the traffic from the road would permit new east-west linkages and help make the town that aspires to be a city more user-friendly for residents, visitors and those who work here.

Alsop also considers that the next revamp of the town's first purpose-built shopping area, the Whitgift Centre,  offers scope for rebuilding with residential accommodation above, open gardens at rooftop level and routes that take pedestrians directly from East Croydon to Old Town.  Extra bridging space created for Park Hill could see it as the ideal location for an iconic visitor attraction.

Most enterprising of all, in the eyes of those who commissioned Alsop are ideas for bringing the River Wandle to the surface as a watery trigger for a series of lakes and lagoons - lapping familiar historic features such as the Parish Church and Surrey Street Pumping Station.  Such a move would restore the kind of water features around which the first generation of Croydonians clustered.   Alsop's vision for Croydon also shows that while the architect may have earned a reputation for the ultra modern he is intent on balancing  this with respect for the town's heritage.

Said the council's cabinet member for regeneration and economic development, Councillor Tim Pollard: "At present Will Alsop's concepts are a powerful device for stimulating interest and provoking debate.  But even in their formative stages  they appear to have already captured enthusiasm among developers, investors, businesses and stakeholders - including those residents who helpfully contributed to the formative workshop discussions.  We believe they will make an important contribution to drawing up a new statutory plan for the town centre.  And it's more than likely that some of the ideas could surface as proposals for formal public consultation in the next year or so.

"We chose Alsop because he has a reputation for coming up with something out of the ordinary.  In devising his vision for Croydon, Will Alsop has dared Croydon to dream about its future.   This is just what we wanted when we set him the challenge of taking a fresh, no-holds-barred look at what Croydon might look like if an architect was given the existing town centre as a blank canvass.  The timing of this exercise is impeccable - not just in terms of preparing our new development plan but also when key sites are available for redevelopment and the town is looking for a new lease of life."