Houses clustered in village streetscenes, apartments with views out over water, and a listed Victorian abbey fronted by a stately boulevard and expanses of green. These could be postcard views of Surrey, but they are actually all scenes from a new vision of living at Ingress Park in the Thames Gateway. Crest Nicholson’s scheme challenges the view that all that is built in the Gateway has to be modernist, experimental and packed with apartments. With its more traditional-looking scheme the housebuilder has persuaded homebuyers that the Gateway can match anything that Surrey has to offer.
On a brownfield site beside the River Thames at Greenhithe, Crest Nicholson is creating a mixed use, mixed tenure community of more than 1000 new homes and commercial space alongside the abbey, which has been converted to offices. Around the site’s assets – its historic abbey, the waterfront and woodland areas - architect Gardner Stewart has designed the scheme in eight distinct character areas to create a strong sense of place and neighbourly environments. Landscape architect Murdoch Wickham designed the public realm, which includes creating a heritage trail encompassing a number of follies in the abbey grounds.
For the homes, Gardner Stewart has taken its inspiration from the Kent vernacular, assembling townhouses, mews and apartment blocks into contiguous village-style streetscenes. Look out of a top floor window of a house on an upper level of the sloping site and before you is a complex, and seemingly hugger mugger roofscape. In fact this scene was designed as the homes’ fifth elevation.
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