RCKa

Welcome to Locomotopia! Over the last few months RCKa has been developing speculative proposals for how England's rural train stations might enable sustainable new settlements in the countryside. We've examined the potential of one station in North Hertfordshire—Ashwell & Morden—and have designed a masterplan which shows how a new settlement might look when considered alongside other developments around adjoining stations on the same line. Ashwell & Morden is on both the Thameslink and Great Northern routes, 20 minutes from central Cambridge and 45 minutes from St Pancras, with four trains an hour at peak times—yet all that exists here is a car park, scrap yard and a handful of houses. It's the perfect location for a new settlement. The scheme demonstrates how sustainable methods of transport can be prioritised, with cars demoted to the periphery of the town centre. 10,000 people could be housed here, with new shops, community facilities, primary school and doctors' surgery within five minutes' walk. Our previous research identified the potential for 1.2m homes around stations in the countryside, and Locomotopia provides a model for how this might be achieved. -- Design and illustrations by Christopher Barnes and Anna Crew with support from Tim Riley and Russell Curtis.

After a successful run at The Building Centre, our temporary modular home has now landed at Romford Market! Open from 10 March to 3 April, this installation showcases how modular construction can deliver high-quality, temporary homes – fast. Designed, built and installed in just 90 days at the Building Centre, the module demonstrates a smarter approach to temporary accommodation, providing safe, warm, and self-contained living spaces for those in need. See it for yourself at Romford Market and learn more here: https://lnkd.in/ejuytyu4 Thank you to our partners: London Borough of Havering, Rollalong Ltd, RCKa, Better Delivery, Design4Structures and HTA Design LLP. #ModularHousing #Innovation #WatesResidential #HousingCrisis

A month ago, we installed a prototype module - designed by RCKa and built by our friends at Rollalong Ltd, supported by Wates Group - outside the Building Centre to demonstrate how we can deliver meanwhile transitional housing quickly and efficiently. The 63sqm apartment arrived in central London on the back of three lorries and was installed in just three hours (we reckon we can get this down to two). And, just to show how easily they can be demounted and moved elsewhere, yesterday the home was relocated to Havering Town Hall, where it will remain until we take it up to UKREiiF in May. If you're interested in taking a look at what we've achieved (you really have to step inside to appreciate how much of an improvement it is compared to most "temporary accommodation"), please drop us a line. There's more detail about the project on our website. Thanks to Paul Jones for the photo!

"The issue of temporary accommodation is significant—there’s a huge amount of money being spent on it, around £1.6 billion a year. It works out to about £75 per night... we need mechanisms to deploy good-quality temporary accommodation on suitable sites." We talked to director at RCKa, Russell Curtis, about his practice’s #modular concept that looks to use meanwhile sites for those looking for #temporaryhousing. Read on in the link below: https://lnkd.in/ehCRmQEZ The modular home is on Store Street crescent outside the Building Centre, as part of the New Homes in New Ways exhibition co-curated by the Building Centre and the Housing Festival. Check it out before the modular concept leaves on Tuesday 4th March.

Some more coverage of our temporary accommodation solution that we've designed with modular specialist Rollalong Ltd in Architecture Today, where RCKa director Russell Curtis discusses how innovations in planning, design and delivery might help meet our profound housing crisis, saving councils billions of pounds whilst also providing safe, comfortable and well-designed homes that can mitigate the profound human cost of homelessness.

"Everything, everywhere, all at once". I heard this phrase mentioned several times at the Building Centre's #NewHomesInNewWays conference yesterday, where I was speaking about ways in which we might make tweaks to the planning system to accelerate affordable and emergency housing. The temporary accommodation crisis is a financial scandal, a human tragedy, and we should be ashamed of ourselves that we've allowed it to happen. The problem is so profound that we need an emergency response: building homes of all types, everywhere, all at once. Yet conventional planning methods and traditional construction techniques won't get us there: there's insufficient capacity and skills within the system to enable it to happen. A combination of planning reform—changes to permitted development rights; Local Development Orders might be two, as we discussed on the panel—together with innovative methods of delivery is the only way forward. On Monday I was delighted to speak at the Houses of Parliament about proposals to expand PDR to include meanwhile emergency homes, and this week RCKa launched a prototype module, which we designed with Rollalong Ltd, which we've installed outside the Building Centre for the next two weeks. (Drop me a line if you'd like to have a look around.) There's no excuse to not build the homes we desperately need. We have the land, the tools, the money, and the need. So why aren't we doing it? You can find out more on our website here: https://lnkd.in/eQDiFfCr

A week ago today, we installed our demonstrator module outside the Building Centre in central London. Since then, London boroughs have together spent £28,000,000 on housing families in hotels, bedsits and private rented accommodation. The prototype modular home we've designed was designed, manufactured and deployed in just 70 days. It arrived on Friday morning at the crack of dawn and was installed by 10am—it would have been quicker had we not been so tight for space. The turnkey cost is around £100,000, including all finishes, kitchens and bathrooms: 280 of these could have been built for the same money that councils spent in the last week alone: more than a thousand people could now have a warm, comfortable home. Innovations like this, which was manufactured by our friends at Rollalong Ltd, are desperately needed to tackle the financial scandal and human tragedy of temporary accommodation. We have the skills, the capability, the land, the money and the need: so, what's stopping us from getting on with it?

"This is a place that allows for several futures...if you’re looking for design that humanises, here it is." We're honoured to have HNCC featured in the Observer this weekend, with a thoughtful and generous review from architecture critic Rowan Moore, who celebrates the "fat-thin, heavy-light, orderly-informal, messy-coherent, serious-playful" place that we've created for London Borough of Camden. The product of a decade working closely with the local community, this scheme demonstrates what's possible with a progressive client that's prepared to invest in emerging practices, a motivated and passionate local community, together with a tenacious and talented design team. The journey has not all been smooth sailing, as Rowan suggest in his article, but the end product is something that we can all be proud of. Thanks to our team of collaborators, particularly Camlins which was responsible for the fantastic public realm design, Conisbee providing structural and civil engineering, and the brilliant RCKa team—past and present—without whose dedication the project would never have happened: Project Architect and Associate Director, Alan Beveridge; Rhiona Williams; Maria Saeki; Christopher Permain; Dieter Kleiner; Hannah Cherry; James Hockey; Roger Bonnar; Lucy Devereux; Chris Scarffe; Quincy Haynes; Katie Hackett; Daria Szmucer; Mhari Stevenson; Emma Graham; Thomas Deckker; Alicia Arguelles; Edwin Veth and Michael Pitman.

"This is a place that allows for several futures...if you’re looking for design that humanises, here it is." We're honoured to have HNCC featured in the Observer this weekend, with a thoughtful and generous review from architecture critic Rowan Moore, who celebrates the "fat-thin, heavy-light, orderly-informal, messy-coherent, serious-playful" place that we've created for London Borough of Camden. The product of a decade working closely with the local community, this scheme demonstrates what's possible with a progressive client that's prepared to invest in emerging practices, a motivated and passionate local community, together with a tenacious and talented design team. The journey has not all been smooth sailing, as Rowan suggest in his article, but the end product is something that we can all be proud of. Thanks to our team of collaborators, particularly Camlins which was responsible for the fantastic public realm design, Conisbee providing structural and civil engineering, and the brilliant RCKa team—past and present—without whose dedication the project would never have happened: Project Architect and Associate Director, Alan Beveridge; Rhiona Williams; Maria Saeki; Christopher Permain; Dieter Kleiner; Hannah Cherry; James Hockey; Roger Bonnar; Lucy Devereux; Chris Scarffe; Quincy Haynes; Katie Hackett; Daria Szmucer; Mhari Stevenson; Emma Graham; Thomas Deckker; Alicia Arguelles; Edwin Veth and Michael Pitman.

"This is a place that allows for several futures...if you’re looking for design that humanises, here it is." We're honoured to have HNCC featured in the Observer this weekend, with a thoughtful and generous review from architecture critic Rowan Moore, who celebrates the "fat-thin, heavy-light, orderly-informal, messy-coherent, serious-playful" place that we've created for London Borough of Camden. The product of a decade working closely with the local community, this scheme demonstrates what's possible with a progressive client that's prepared to invest in emerging practices, a motivated and passionate local community, together with a tenacious and talented design team. The journey has not all been smooth sailing, as Rowan suggest in his article, but the end product is something that we can all be proud of. Thanks to our team of collaborators, particularly Camlins which was responsible for the fantastic public realm design, Conisbee providing structural and civil engineering, and the brilliant RCKa team—past and present—without whose dedication the project would never have happened: Project Architect and Associate Director, Alan Beveridge; Rhiona Williams; Maria Saeki; Christopher Permain; Dieter Kleiner; Hannah Cherry; James Hockey; Roger Bonnar; Lucy Devereux; Chris Scarffe; Quincy Haynes; Katie Hackett; Daria Szmucer; Mhari Stevenson; Emma Graham; Thomas Deckker; Alicia Arguelles; Edwin Veth and Michael Pitman.