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.
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Don’t get too carried away. The competition rules stressed that practicalities were not important, and that no funding was available to the winning project – it was just a way of increasing the conversation about and around ‘Green Infrastructure’. So saying instead of saying that us Brits are planning to build a mushroom garden in an old railway tunnel, saying that we have fantasized about it is closer to the mark. But without fantasies we will never do anything, so the competition was no bad thing.
I was involved with two of the 170 entries: one was deliverable but expensive, and the other very deliverable one bit at a time.
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