ICF National Study Tour 2016

The Institute of Chartered Foresters  held an ICF National Study Tour; The Streets of London, Resilience of People, Resilience of Place on Wednesday 5th and Thursday 6th October 2016 in the London Boroughs of Southwark and Lambeth.

The two day study tour looked at the importance of trees and green landscaping within the Capital City of London, both in new projects to re-invigorate brown field sites and also the difficulties and solutions in maintaining and preserving the Capital’s woodlands.

Our own Luke Fay and Matt Searle met the Tour with the Public Realm Team from Lendlease to present and show the Tour around the work that we have been involved with at the Elephant Park Regeneration project in Elephant and Castle, London. Finishing with a walk through the Stirling Award nominated Trafalgar Place development.

Our work on this project, which will include the development of the largest park to be delivered in London for 70 years, started at Outline Planning and from the start we have applied our expertise to support Lendlease’s goal to achieve high-quality living-space harmoniously set among mature trees.

We implemented our evidence-based approach from design and planning through to delivery; using Ground Penetrating Radar to map roots and applying our expert knowledge of tree growth and rooting environments to inform design. We model the increasing value of trees over time (using CAVAT) to inform the strategy for tree replacement and use our tree management software (MyTrees) to maintain live tree and design information and to plan the management of the trees throughout construction and once the buildings and the landscape are in use.

An excellent working relationship with the design team and the construction team, when they were on site, was essential for successful delivery of the project which shows that modern urban dwellings can be successfully constructed within a wooded context.

Treework has had a long association with the various organisations involved with London’s urban development, preservation and maintenance including, from construction through to some of the city’s iconic green spaces.

This was the first ICF Study Tour looking at trees and greenspace in London and feedback from those who attended has been excellent.