Mixed-use, co-location schemes in busy London neighbourhoods are the future of urban living. Juniper House, in Walthamstow, flies the flag

Juniper House, designed by Pollard Thomas Edwards and built by Hill for the London Borough of Waltham Forest, is located on a brownfield site opposite Walthamstow Central, one of the capital’s busiest local stations. It features 91 mixed-tenure homes alongside a nursery for more than 50 local children. This mixed-use exemplar also contains two floors of classrooms and social space and a winter garden, for the University of Portsmouth’s London campus, as well as a ‘pocket park’ that connecting the development with adjacent residential streets.

Half of the residential floor space is given over to affordable homes, 41 in total, some for social rent, others shared ownership. The bigger for rent family homes with three and four bedrooms also have their own front doors. And all homes, regardless of tenure – apart from those specifically designed for wheelchair users – are car free.

How Juniper House relates to and enhances the townscape nearby was largely governed by scale and the need to transition between the high density, infrastructural quality of the station where a cluster of taller buildings is emerging (brownfield sites here enjoy the highest possible public transport rating) and the two-storey Edwardian terraces to the south and east, in Walthamstow’s ‘village’. 

This has been achieved through its massing and form, expressed using two distinct architectural languages. The first is an iridescent grey brick tower with a stacked grid of crisply articulated windows and precast frames that speaks to the town centre. The second is a lower-rise undulating ‘tail’, more domestic in scale, with irregular punched openings in a red, buff brick directly addressing the village.

Together with new cycle parking and the pocket park, this strategic approach to urban design has made Juniper House’s location, a complex gyratory traffic system, considerably more welcoming for pedestrians and cyclists.

The technical specification includes SuDS, smart meters, underfloor heating and mechanical ventilation and heat recovery. Its fabric first design means energy performance outperforms the Regs by more than 35 per cent while the nursery and commercial units are rated BREEAM Very Good.

Low-carbon heating is provided by communal air source heat pumps and PV panels while biodiversity measures such as bat boxes, blue and green roofs and the new park that links the development with residential First Avenue (part of a government Levelling Up project worth £18m) burnish the scheme’s broader sustainability credentials.

Justin Laskin, Partner at Pollard Thomas Edwards said: “We are delighted to see Juniper House’s residents moving into their new homes. This project is a great example of public and private sector working together to make it happen - delivering much needed housing and education uses on a site that many would have said wasn’t possible.”