London Road, Harston
Harston is a small Cambridgeshire village, just south of the encroaching urban density and thriving biotechnical growth industries of the city. The only thing which belies the idea of Harston as a sleepy rural village is the Porsche and Aston Martin showrooms on the High Street.
This development site sits at the gateway to the village, at the corner of a hostile over-engineered highway junction, at the end of a long vista peering up the A10 towards Cambridge.
A takeaway restaurant previously occupied this corner, in what became a derelict sad empty building. Our initial response to the redevelopment of the site was to address the vista with a building which responded to the gateway setting, standing proud at the junction with walls and roofs rising up and folding origami-like around the corner. But the Council objected to a design which looked aspirationally towards Cambridge, and so the approved and built scheme is one of enclosing walls, which protect and conceal the inward facing collection of houses.
The design consists of two parts: a new corner building of two semi-detached cottages, mirrored across the axis of the road junction, and anchored with two large chimney stacks which root the two gables to the corner; and six additional dwellings occupying the centre of the site, facing onto a shared court with parking and soft landscaping, bookended with similar buttress-like chimneys. The roofs run perpendicular to the frontage, which form as line of gables which define each house and creates a scale in keeping with the character of the neighbouring streets.
A protective boundary wall grows out of the large chimneys, then wraps around into the internal facing elevations, becoming a brick colonnade which defines the rhythm of windows, entrance porches and placement of each home.
The houses face onto a shared enclosed space, part parking, part shared garden, providing a sense of shared identity for the residents, enlivened by the active frontages of the homes opening onto this contained green space. Where the site turns the corner onto the quiet side street the boundary wall stops and a metal railing supports a newly planted hedgerow and trees which will provide a soft edge and green outlook for the homes.
Photos by Richard Fraser
