Open City Accelerate 2025

What a year, its been bumpy and energy giving in equal measure! We wish every one of our followers, friends, collaborators and clients a happy 2025.⁠

Our Christmas charities this year have been Shelter and Hackney Hight Shelter, any help you can give too would be sincerely appreciated.

If you’d like to download a digital copy of our yearbook, please follow the link here.

-Dan & the Periscope Team⁠

The strategic infrastructure works at Meridian Water have started on site. Streets, drainage, earthworks, bridges and parks funded by £195m from the Ministry of Homes Communities & Local Government are being delivered by Taylor Woodrow will provide the development platform for at least 5000 homes.⁠ Periscope has designed two green spaces, Brooks Park and Edmonton Marshes at the core of the project.

Earlier in the autumn Ellen Hägerdal was promoted to Practice Manager having acted in the role for the past year. She now leads our strategic management including team wellbeing and development, finance and business systems. ⁠

This winter season Periscope is again raising money for Shelter's 'Walk for Home'. All funds go towards building a future supporting people who are living in unsafe or unfit housing or with no permanent place to call home. ⁠

This is a cause that can have a real impact to people's lives at the most challenging time of year; if you'd like to support us and donate, please check this link, anything you can give will make a real difference to Shelter's work.

Last month we were pleased to promote William Pattison to Architect following successful completion of the Architecture Postgraduate Diploma in Professional Practice at London Metropolitan University. Will has been working with Periscope for the past 18 months and we've all been impressed with his ability to make such valuable contributions to project work while studying for his Part III qualifications.

Periscope has been appointed to work with the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) via its' new framework. Over the next four years our team will help shape the future of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park for generations to come.

Find out more here.

Image ©LLDC.

We’ve won Capital and Centric’s competition for St George's Wolverhampton!⁠

Working with our friends Mikhail Riches we’re excited to be co-masterplanning the repair of this historic city district. We’ll also be looking after the design of a glorious new city park, a network of new public spaces and the remaking of several historic streets. While we’re doing that Mikhail Riches will be busy adapting the former Sainsburys building into high performance new homes while other parts of the site will host family housing at a variety of scales. The eponymous church will be re-proposed into community and work spaces surrounded by independent businesses at the heart of the scheme. ⁠
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Find out more here.

Over the weekend we hosted ecology object workshops and practice talks in our office as part of the Open House Festival 2024. Alberto, Ellen and Jessie led the team in the build up and on the day, we thoroughly enjoyed the conversations, the energy of making and are looking forward to participating again in 2025.

This week our clients in LB Redbridge and in LB Lewisham have been awarded £3m and £2.46m respectively for their projects 'Ilford Arrival' and 'Room for Rivers, A Place for People'. ⁠The image above is from a Pilot Engagement 'Dramawalk' with Lewisham Youth Theatre, photography by Jason Baney⁠.

⁠Find out more at the GLA here. BBC press here.

This week we've been in Wolverhampton with Mikhail Riches presenting our ideas for the St George's neighbourhood. We were also fortunate to spend time with the Regeneration Brainery and Wolverhampton Youth Council working through their wishes for the future of the city.

In February 2024, we had the chance to mentor two brilliant students, Humayra and Shamun, as part of the Open City Accelerate Programme. Their project theme was Rituals, translating the spectacular and mundane into celebratory designs for an overlooked site in Dalston.

You can check out their amazing final work of sketches and models at the Accelerate Summer Exhibition from 11-14 July. More info here.

We've published our Impact Report covering the last two years, it can be downloaded here.

The B-Corp framework requires continuous monitoring and improvement, this report includes actions we've taken over the five B Impact areas together with supporting case studies and where we're heading next.

Not one, but two new team members have joined Periscope! ⁠We're happy to welcome Paola Zanotto, a long standing collaborator who now joins us to work on masterplanning and strategic projects. Caitlin Jakusz-Paridy comes to us from Canada via Norway and her work on the afterlife of extraction sites.

In January this year we began working with London Borough of Redbridge to produce a town centre spatial strategy for western Ilford. The project involved synthesising previous work and extending it into a comprehensive strategy for connecting the town centre to the wider borough.⁠

In 2024 a rising tide of noise is engulfing our lives, sometimes sound gives our lives meaning and sometimes it drowns us in over-stimulation. What is good and bad noise and where are our non-human friends in the cacophony? We’d like to find out so this year we’re using our shop front as the transmitter to hear echoes from far beyond the confines of Dalston and the city. ⁠

Join us as we respond to nature and place via performances, installations and sonic conversations at Microscope. Over the coming weeks and months we’ll be hosting a series of events, please check back soon or look at the Eventbrite link here.

The last few years have seen much discussion over how fundamentally the world of work has changed following COVID-19, unfortunately this talk doesn't seem to have resulted in significant impact to core working practices. In light of this and the increased focus of younger professionals on quality of life over burn-out we thought that we might try changing how Periscope works. For seven months between September 2023 and March 2024 Periscope ran a four-day-week trial, the results can be downloaded here.

Earlier this year Alberto and Rebecca joined Cambridge City Council, Mission Street and Hawkins Brown to co-design and engage with KS2 students at The Spinney Primary School in Cherry Hinton. The outcomes of the sessions will be included in the adjacent innovation district which is due to commence on site next year.

The Gurnell Leisure Centre & Parklands in LB Ealing has been submitted for planning approval. Periscope has led the design of the enhanced parkland which includes climate-resilient plantings, significant biodiversity enhancements, a new urban woodland, river and surface water attenuation components together with new play areas, a new skatepark and pump track.

Find out more here.

The strategic infrastructure works at Meridian Water have won a Pineapple Future Public Realm award. Together Brooks Park and Edmonton Marshes will be the largest parks delivered in the Lea Valley since the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in 2012. Designed in collaboration with Enfield Council and ARUP both parks and the wider infrastructure works have now started construction and are due to complete in 2025.

Our collaboration with Al-Jawad Pike in east Hackney has won an RIBA London Award and been shortlisted for the RIBA Stirling Prize.

Find out more here or on our project page.