How do you bring life back to inaccessible urban sites?

Sherborne Wharf, despite its proximity to the well-known, and successfully regenerated, Gas Street Basin and Brindley Place, has remained an unoccupied and inaccessible piece of Birmingham’s city centre. We created a development strategy for the three-acre site, looking at how it might be possible to give it a renewed sense of place, with each phase of construction building off the last.

'We investigated how we could instil a sense of place bringing both community value and commercial viability to the site'

The strategy was phased as a series of ‘chapters’ to minimise risk and embed the new identity over time. Local events and pop-ups would bring people to the site while the design was carried out. We proposed the acquisition of a derelict mill nearby that could be converted into a design and technology hub to act as an anchor and attractor for further, incremental development, bringing footfall back to this forgotten corner of the city.  Various uses complimented the surrounding area - not completing with it - to knit into the offer the city centre provides.