The Project
Cricklewood Lane is a residential-led development on a prominent site in Cricklewood incorporating flexible ground floor commercial space, shared living accommodation and associated communal amenities on the upper floors, car parking and attractive landscaping. Existing outdated and unattractive buildings are being demolished to make way for the high-quality, highly sustainable scheme, which aims to upgrade the look and feel of the entire area while providing much-needed living space.
Project Details
The three-block project will deliver 331 studio apartments with kitchenettes designed for shorter lets of up to a year by younger professionals and couples. Complementing the living spaces will be shared kitchen, laundry, co-working, leisure and other communal space (including rooftop community areas). The ground floor commercial units (including a bar, local supermarket and retail units, are designed to provide an improved and active street frontage in line with the Council’s town centre policy.
Our Role
Veretec was appointed to provide Stage 3 design development services, particularly in relation to updating the building layouts to meet fire safety requirements and new BS 9991 standards.
A key challenge is that the site is a highly constrained urban location with only one frontage for entry and exit; achieving BS 9991 fire safety accreditation required innovative thinking as well as collaboration with the landscape designers (Place Design) to ensure safe access and egress. We amended the existing design to provide improved and safer circulation, avoiding pinch points and the risk of crowding at entrance or ground floor amenity areas. The buildings would count as Higher Risk Buildings under the Building Safety act and so we are ensuring the highest fire safety standards are adopted.
Another challenge was aesthetic – the buildings are designed with feature brickwork and GRC detailing to provide a very attractive street frontage which reflects and complements the wider area’s Victorian red brick and ironwork heritage. The site constraints required us to find a ventilation and building services solution which would not compromise the design vision for the buildings’ frontages, avoiding cluttering them with visible vents or services entry points. One solution was vertical heating and cooling via roof vents, which would be more expensive, so we looked at alternative solutions which balance the visual element with value for money for the client (bearing in mind that the flats need to be affordable).
“We are passionate about creating equitable, non-discriminatory housing. To this end, we have cultivated a team of equally passionate people; with the complimentary skill set needed to take on the ambitious task of facing down the UK’s housing affordability crisis.”
The SOCO
We are working alongside the cost consultant Core Five to explore specification packages within budget and to implement these via the employer’s requirements we are helping to define with the client.
The development is designed to be sustainable, with the ground floor commercial spaces meeting BREEAM Very Good requirements. The buildings make use of natural ventilation with heat recycling and use air source heat pumps. There is also extensive greenery across the blocks’ roof spaces, while internal areas make excellent use of natural light. This, in conjunction with the emphasis on creating a sense of community, helps to ensure wellbeing is at the heart of the building design.
This project is due to be completed in Summer 2028.