Colosseum Retail Park
- Client: NEAT Developments, BlackRock Real Assets
- Contacts: Guy Harris, Charles Graham, Michał Affanasowicz
The transformation of the Colosseum Retail Park, a 10-acre underused retail park in north Enfield, into a new, truly mixed-use neighbourhood, will create a highly desirable place to both live and work, forging stronger links between the neighbouring communities to the east and west.
The scheme will bring forward up to 1,800 new homes set within a well-defined framework of accessible public space featuring a reinterpretation of London streets and park spaces, designed to provide amenity for residents and the wider local community. This neighbourhood will support itself, with over 300 newly created jobs, many in a flexible 41,000sqft WorkHub supporting SME business and encouraging employment locally, new local shops, restaurants and community facilities.
Driven by a clear vision to create a vibrant place for a new community to thrive and the existing ones to meet and connect, the intention is to make this a reality, through delivering a cultural and commercially successful neighbourhood as a vision for the redevelopment of the wider area.
The development seeks to build on what is special about Enfield; it’s culture, community, character, and quality open spaces. The scheme will enhance and provide new and improved open space and green infrastructure to the area, providing new residents with a place to experience new urban living, acting as a catalyst for the future regeneration of this under-utilised area.
At the centre of the development, The Heart, a generous landscaped plaza which features areas for play and relaxation, will become the focus of the new community defined along its edges by shops, restaurants and community offerings.
The Heart will become the focal point for connections to the surrounding area, establishing thoroughfares and links between the site and existing communities to the east and west. Beyond The Heart, the development has been organised as a series of building blocks, many with landscaped podium courtyards envisaged as quiet, introspective retreats away from the public realm, creating east-west and north-south permeability through the site in the form of new park spaces providing safe pedestrian and cycle routes, and richly landscaped safe streets.
Evolving over 700 years, Enfield Town has established a rich vernacular of architectural depth and a layering of styles, seldom found in many other established areas within London. Buildings of different ages and styles frequently appear to overlap and intersect creating a rich interplay of shapes and volumes.
The proposal has been inspired by these principles and seeks to emulate this character through this layered approach and a rich, variable architectural character. The proposed massing strategy based on a ‘family’ of building typologies with their different scales, features, articulation and rooflines and the use of a common palette of materials, would result in a development that will have a strong distinctive character. When layered, the ‘family’ of building typologies achieves a character of a place that has grown slowly over time, layer upon layer.
