High Line for London Competition Has a Winner…
After the first succesful elevated park in New York City, the city of Chicago also decided to create something similar called the Bloomingdale Trail. The trend of elevated parks has now also reached the British capital. The Brits however, have decided to give their own twist to this concept and are now planning to build a mushroom garden in an old railway tunnel beneath Oxford Street.
The Mayor of London, the Landscape Institute and the Garden Museum collaborated to host a competition for the design of a green piece infrastructure. The advertisement for the competition promotes itself with ‘A High Line for London’ just to give the designers an idea of what’s expected from them.
The competition received 170 entries of which 20 were selected and eventually one project was chosen. The winning design was entered by Fletcher Priest Architects. It features an underground mushroom farm located in old, unused Mail Rail tunnels. The tunnel will be lit by glass-fibre ‘mushrooms’ which are placed on street level, they will also highlight the underground route from above. Despite the popularity of the project, it is still not sure when construction on the old tunnel will begin.
