Redchurch Street Place Making Vision
OnRedchurch
Date: 2023
London
A community-led vision for a historic yet disconnected street in London.
Images: Food for Thought and What’s Next Community Engagement Events
In March 2022, supported by the GLA and London Leap’s High Streets for All Challenge, onRedchurch CIC commissioned JA Projects to deliver a Place Making Vision for the Redchurch Street neighbourhood.
Historically, Redchurch Street evolved as a neighbourhood of furniture makers, merchants and diaspora communities. Today, some 400 years later, it is a dynamic but disparate area, known for retail outlets, hospitality, cultural facilities, and the creative and tech industries. JA Projects’s vision aims to reflect the area’s cultural heritage and embrace its new era of creativity and innovation.
For this project, the JA Projects team engaged with local residents, business owners and stakeholders to formulate a vision that responded to their shared ambitions, restored the area’s connections to its neighbours, and capitalised on opportunities to improve the public realm.
As part of the process, JA Projects explored ways in which residents might reconnect with the street and establish new relationships with adjacent neighbourhoods and communities. Activities included collaborative radio broadcasts, collective meals, prototypical business residencies, collective walking tours, and led to the formation of a local community steering group.
The result was an active network alongside a vision that carefully addressed the economic and social needs of the area by physically improving the public realm, addressing issues such as vacant ground-floor units, and enriching the sense of warmth and connectedness offered by the streetscape.
At the core of this approach was a desire to:
Make Redchurch a more inclusive, accessible and resilient street
Promote difference and diversity in use of Street
Start to create a greater, more equitable relationship between Redchurch Street and its neighbourhood
Enable onRedchurch CIC to work more collaboratively and effectively in future
An abridged version of the report can be found on the onRedchurch website here.
Photos: Local people and business interviewees who contributed to the Place Making Vision.
Core Team
JA Projects, Nada Mohamed, The People Speak, St. Hilda's East Community Centre
Particulars
Client: OnRedchurch