Elena is all set up and part of the blog now ...:))

Responce from LDA Design

Questions for LDA design

I spoke to Sally Prothero who handles parks for LDA and is an ex Greewich student (& only remembers Tom Turner)

Have members of the team (Client, LDA, the engineer and contractors) worked together on other projects, before or after the Northala Fields Project?

Not really though LDA wouldn’t mind working on more projects with these people again. Having said this, LDA are involved with Pryor again on some scheme.

How well did the team work together? How was it structured?

It worked very well. LDA tendered for the job and worked under the main contractor, Pryor.

Were there difficulties along the way and how were these overcome?

She didn’t divulge any to me or couldn’t remember

How was the design proposal compiled and were other players involved at the initial stages?

LDA, were not involved at the initial stages at all but they used the detail drawings of Peter Neal and Edel [I’m not sure if that’s a company]. And these designs got to RIBA stage E and to RIBA stage D [what Tam?]

The gate fees were originally intended to fund continuing work on the project.  How successful was this?

(A bit of a dumb question) Very successful it funded the park and simple stopped when no more loads were brought in.

To what extent have Phase 2 plans been implemented? Can you confirm that the Phase 2 plans included the creation of a new hill the aim of which would be to help raise £1.5m?  And that this money would then go towards funding the construction of a visitor and education centre, a bridge over Kensington Road, toilets, a café, community hall and offices for park rangers?  

Her comment to me was go and see the park. The building has been built but not a lot of Phase 2 has been built. & Will only be when someone with the energy from the council  like the main player in Ealing at the time, moves it forwards (not like likely with the council budgets being cut etc)

How did the change of the design team work, for example did it affect the copyright of the design? 

No, LDA were employed to produce detail designs of Peter Neals & Edel’s drawings. And later LDA come up with their own designs for the various features like gabions etc . The details were pretty scant [on the documents (tender doc’s?)]

LDA have a long history of working with Local Authorities, is this why you became involved?

No, LDA simply won the tender

LDA Design states on the website that it specializes in, “Public and Private Realm, Energy & Sustainability, Development Promotion, Regeneration & Redevelopment, Natural Environment, Infrastructure Delivery, EIA.”  Was it the specific expertise you have in these areas the reason LDA were invited to take over the project?

The main reason is that LDA had just finished the Gunpowder Park in the Lee Valley and were keen to get involved in further creation of ecological park along with a range of habitat etc.

How did the consultation process affect the design and the outcomes of the project? For example, were any of the schemes proposed by the public and then realised by LDA?  Or were most of the ideas initiated by the designers and then approved or ‘fine-tuned’ by the public/consultation process?

The consultation process was largely finished before LDA come on board. But there were certain things that LDA would not of thought of but were held as highly important [by the steering committee presumably] like the model boating lake. Sally had to learn all about what it takes to have a good model boat lake.

Did Peter Fink continue to have a design role for LDA after it took over from A2A/Form Associates?

No. He arrived at various meetings and [by her tone sounds like he wasn’t very helpful] and wanted to spend a lot of extra money on some part of the project [?]

[my comments now – it’s not surprizing that he wasn’t involved, the council have changed he had fallen out with the council (though to hand it to him exposed a possible ‘sleight of hand’ by the council re’ where gate fees ended up). Then does he really look like a man who would get involved with the details & nuts & bolts of the project – I think the little yellow glasses, normally for just for little girls, says it all]

How complete was Peter Fink’s designs for the whole scheme and which parts were initiated by LDA?  For example, was the recycling of materials such as the timber, plastics, concrete and bricks used in gabion walls, benches and pathways part of Peter Fink’s original scheme? Or were some of the recycling ideas extensions from the main ‘re-use of earth’ concept?

Peter Fink’s concept was developed into usable drawings by Peter Neal and Edel. LDA were only given brief info and they then had to develop all the detail designs for all aspects [as mentioned Peter Fink was only at conceptual stage really]

What was the greatest achievement of the project?

Deliver a park for Ealing community, which is ecologically deverse, provides a mix of recreational uses restores a derelict area which was becoming anti-social into an area that can be enjoyed by everyone. Without costing the taxpayers anything!

Extras: (Sally mentioned a couple of extra points that are interesting:

Driving force was the councillor from Ealing (she could remember but I think is was maybe that Jason someone..)  According to her it was his idea about using muck from building project to form a park and pay for it [it is genius really]

All four hills have a slightly different make up of soils so as to create different habitats LDA worked with soil scientists and ecologists to get the mixes right. This was quite hard as they wanted to get acidic soils but they were dealing with London Clay (not acid).

 They were mixing crushed concrete, London Clay & I cannot remember (dead bodies possibly) into different mixes on the four hills to provide different habitats from different pH’s and drainage ranges.

Though she says over time these will all become more similar to each other

Discussion with Paul McKenzie

How did the engineers influence the design? Were the engineers employed to provide the solution or they were involved in the design stage as well? The latter is not confirmed as there is no evidence the two engineering companies taking credit of any involvement. Not in their portfolio, nor in other documents.

An important aspect discussed was the design features on the 2D architect’s plans, these were not feasible to construct on the 3D shape, this then meant Paul was faced with the job of completing some in house redesign of some of the radiuses’ and alignments. He insists; “little on the job was a straight-line!” An example of the in house design is the redesigning of the spiral mound so that it both looked correct from a birds eye view and worked as a mathematical and geometric figure that fitted on the 1in3 slopes

From listening to Paul it is clear that the job was not simple in anyway, he says “the construction of the conical mounds was a challenge.” The material, as it was being placed progressively to the top of each mound would create boulders that rolled down the 1in3 gradient slopes and would then destroy the site batterails which radiated out from the centre. This required constant rechecking and engineering from both Paul and the rest of the team. 

The engineering part only talks about the details that are visible as result. Was truly the design and technical detailing about what it can be seen today or it was more comprehensive and detailed than it could be accomplished?

Paul McKenzie was first involved in the project at contract tender stage with the company CJ Pryor (contract) ltd in 2002. This required verifying the volumes that would be required to create the shapes as shown on the initial design for the park.

The initial process also involved having an appraisal meeting with Ealing Borough council to discuss how the park would be constructed between the various contractors with their bid.

Paul explains: “I was quite taken back by the initial designs because it involved the creation of four very large conical mounds on a flat landscape.” The tallest of which would be approximately 26 metres. These mounds would be the largest of their kind in Europe. After he was awarded the construction bid of the project, many tasks had to be undertaken before any construction could actually begin

Working closely alongside Ealing Borough Council Paul was able provide drawings and a clear visualisation of what the completed park would look like, in order to seek the approval of the local residents. This was done by the production of 3D DTM (digital terrain models) that could be interacted with and displayed at a residents meeting. This helped to answer the vast number of questions regarding what the park would look like, as the residents found it hard to understand the 2D drawings and contours that Paul had produced for engineering purposes

What was the public's opinion about the "contaminated rubble" sourced from different construction/demolition sites

The public had no issues with contaminated rubble from the engineers’ perspective. Perhaps that was an issue during the consultation stage but it was quickly reduced to silence once the sources of the rubble had been revealed.

This material came from various demolition and Brownfield sites, “including the old Wembley Stadium, White City and Heathrow terminal 5.”

The ecologic part was considered from the start in the sense of using the surface water for creating the 6 fishing lakes and adjacent vegetation and habitats. The issue with the ecology was that it did not envisage covering the majority of the development, which raised questions for the purpose of the project.

More to come once I receive the email from him with some reformulated questions for clarity and shorter answers. Hopefully I haven't touched the confidentiality contract that he claimed he has about the content of his work and he can deliver the information without any problems.

Note that I reformulated all the questions to strictly suit the engineering part in which he was involved.

No information related to other official bodies will be disclosed including his contractual or individual related connections. He was very clear about it. No information that is not related to his work will be given in any circumstances. For that we should contact the relevant bodies - i.e. the council for project brief, the designer for the design, etc.

Meeting notes from 15/02/2013

1) Competition brief - not available from the LI (they didn't run the competition), or RIBA, etc. Conclusion is that it must have been run by Ealing Council themselves. We have a summary of the project objectives so getting hold of the brief itself probably isn't a high priority but we can ask Ealing and FoRM when contacting them whether they have a copy they can send us.

ACTION- Add question re. brief to list for Ealing Council and FoRM Assoc.

2) Writing report - agreed to split the group into 3, with each sub-group starting to put text into one of the 3 parts of the report as follows:

Part 1: The Design Team - Valentinos and Elena

Part 2: The Objectives - Matt, Kevin, Cristina
Part 3: Our Team - Mitti, Victor, Tam

ACTION - aim to have first draft of each section by next Friday (all to contribute text, then edit). Next week groups to edit each other's sections, then final week on presentation.

 

3) Questions - agreed to contact design team members and ask relevant questions from the list as follows:

FoRM Assoc - Elena

Ealing Council - Valentinos
Engineering - Mitti
Steering group - Tam
Rob Cairns (Project Manager) - Matt
LDA - Kevin (well volunteered Kevin! Let us know if this is a problem)

ACTION - Each person on list above to review list of questions and produce a list for their team member (with only relevant questions, adjusted where necessary), circulate the list to the rest of the group by [Monday], telephone their organisation, email questions, follow up with phone call to run through questions.

Ideally, we are looking for responses by the end of this week if not before, but we may need to be a bit flexible as the people we are contacting will be busy!

4) Presentation - Still no date confirmed. We need to think about the format - do we try to do something 'imaginative' or just go for a simple approach? Main work on this will be done in the final week.

5) Allocating marks - Still not decided.

6) Site visit - Not decided, but I'm planning to go next Friday morning unless the weather is really bad.

ACTION - All to confirm whether they are planning to go to site on Friday, or availability for visit another time.

7) Blog - Kevin, can you change the Blog settings so that it sends an alert email when anyone updates it? Mitti says you can change the settings somewhere to do this.

No Luck With the Brief Yet!

The above is from an article by Tim Coulthard in Landscape magazine Feb 2009

The LI didn't organise the competition - we may need to contact Ealing for the original brief?

Possible objectives and all questions

Objectives

This will mainly be set out in the original brief. Once we have that but we can speculate for now: 
From the literature we can see the following:

To convert under used land into a park for public use and to provide biodiversity improvement by the creation of different habitat types.

To provide, a barrier and buffer to the noise and disturbance of the A40 motorway for the park (the 100ha Northolt & Greenford Countryside Park). 

To provide varied topography or land art to provide interest to an otherwise featureless landscape and possible views from these land forms. [These are obviously guesses from me as I know the end result but there are clues to this as in Valintinos’s forth point from Ealing Council “In the autumn of 2000, the London Borough of Ealing through open invitation sought design proposals from land artists for a limited restoration of Northala Fields.”]

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi All here is the list of all the questions from people (as is now), as we talked about on Friday we will have to wiltle down the questions to what we need but here is the full list:

Questions:

1.       Confirm site size - generally said to be 18.5ha but Ealing Council website says 27.5ha?  [Ealing Council]

2.       Competition - What was the competition brief? Other entries?  [Ealing Council] 

3.       Who was involved in winning entry & when? [FoRM Assoc] 

4.       Roles and responsibilities throughout? Were these formally recorded (written down)?  [Ealing, FoRM, all?] 

5.       What were Techniker/Peter Brett Assoc roles? (listed as engineers)  [FoRM] 

6.       How well did the team work together? How was it structured - contractual relationships?  [All] 

7.       Have members of the team worked together on other projects, before or after Northala?  [All] 

8.       Any difficulties? How were these overcome?  [All] 

9.       What was the consultation process? Who was involved? How? How effective was it?  

10.   What impact did this have on the design & outcomes? [Ealing, FoRM, Consultees/Steering Group members] 

11.   Compromise between amenity use and ecology/biodiversity:   [ecologist] 

12.   How effective is creation of the distinct (and isolated) habitat types?

13.   Wetland topped up from deep aquifer in periods of low rainfall - not truly sustainable?  

14.   To what extent have Phase 2 plans been implemented  - what has happened, what hasn't and how have these been funded?  [Ealing, FoRM, LDA?] 

15.   LDA taking over from Art2Architecture/Form Assoc. - when, why?  [Ealing, FoRM, LDA] 

16.   How did change of design team work (e.g. design copyright issue)?  [Ealing, FoRM, LDA]

17.   Did Peter Fink continue to have a design role (for LDA?) after A2A/Form Assoc were sacked? [FoRM (Peter Fink)] 

18.   Where was the funding going to come from for the aspirational Phase 2 - Ealing Council seem to think they would have had some liability but Peter Fink insists not?  

19.   Was it ever realistic to think another £5m could be found? Did Cascaid produce any report on this (that we could look at)?  [Ealing, FoRM, Cascaid?] 

20.   How did the design team worked while design proposal done, and spread the work load themselves?

21.      Any one in charge of particular things?

22.   How far their design proposal was build?

23.   What exactly was build from Phase 2?

24.   Is the council planning to develop more of it at a later date?

25.   Did the council come with the idea of the waste been imported on site? Original brief?

26.   Did they have spare money left from the generated income? What they did with them?

27.   . Anyone find more info on the project managers (not Ealing)? EDAW?

28.   Regarding the contractors :

29.   C J Pryor: What extent was the extent of their design in put? Ask LDA/Peter Fink

30.   CR Swift:How much of the actual work was done by Pryor and how much by Swift?

31.   It would be good to understand the process of how Pryor got involved & how Swift got involved & whether there is a history of subcontracting there.. abd all the other relationships between the players some of them must work together on various projects..

32.   When did LDA come on board?

33.   What was their relationship with Peter Fink?

34.   If the concept belonged to Peter Fink and Igor Marko what was their

35.   input to the design process.

36.   What was their brief?

37.   who set their brief.

38.   What were the constraints?

39.  (LDA) What was the greatest achievement of the project?

40.   Were they Happy with the result and if so why or why not?

41.   Who was on the old the Steering Committee (compared to the new 'Steering Board')? [Ealing, Members of Steering Gp] 

42.   What was the public's opinion about the "contaminated rubble" sourced from different construction/demolition sites

43.   "contaminated rubble" How was the above mitigated in order to satisfy or calm the general public concern?

44.   Considering that the design did not consider an ecologic function of the site, was the idea in the end brought in to reduce the concerns in regards with the possible contamination of the materials used as infill?

45.    the engineering part only talks about the details that are visible as result. Was truly the design and technical detailing about what it can be seen today or it was more comprehensive and detailed than it could be accomplished?

46.   Considering that the first phase was financed by the infill site, which were the organisations to finance the phase two works? Council, HLF, Government Grants)

47.   The engineering participation in phase two is not very clear apart from the crib wall installation. Techniker/Peter Brett Assoc. were employed to provide the engineering consultancy by the Landscape Architects. Once this has been accomplished in the first stage were the same companies involved in the second stage? In either of the stages what were the contractual relationship between the designers and the engineering companies?

48.   How did the engineers influence the design? Were the engineers employed to provide the solution or they were involved in the design stage as well? The later is not confirmed as there is no evidence the two engineering companies taking credit of any involvement. Not in their portfolio, nor in other documents.

49.   What was the planning involvement in the whole design? Considering the visual impact of the scheme on the surrounding area how did the planning process influence the design? What were the issues they had to mitigate and what was the engineering response to that?

50.   Could we get hold of a copy of the planning application to see the details and the visual impact assessment and how this impacted the consultation process?

51.   What was Rob Cairns' (Project manager) role in the implementation of the project management plan for phase 2?

52.   what was his responsibility, as a project manager, when the park was downgraded?

53.   what happened with CASCAID (leading fundraising consultancy)commissioned to produce a fundraising strategy?

54.   what happened during the "conspiracy" risk assessment? (when the Conservative parties was elected the councils saw the park no longer as a corporate priority but as a convenient source of ready cash. To justify this, the project underwent an uninformed and highly misleading risk assessment)

55.  could the consultant/stake holder committee be ignored and excluded from the undergoing assessment?

56.  Could the steering committee be suspended and politically gagged?

-----------

I have picked out some clear questions that we could pursue this is only some that I picked so start the ball rolling. Its important to not be protective/precious about our questions.

Anyway these are a the ones that jumped out for me, please pick out your top few too then we can decide/whittle down the ones we want.. 

Competition - What was the competition brief? Other entries? [Ealing Council]

Roles and responsibilities throughout? Were these formally recorded (written down)? [Ealing, FoRM, all?]

How well did the team work together? How was it structured - contractual relationships? [All]

     Have members of the team worked together on other projects, before or after Northala? [All]

 

Compromise between amenity use and ecology/biodiversity: [ecologist]

 

To what extent have Phase 2 plans been implemented - what has happened, what hasn't and how have these been funded? [Ealing, FoRM, LDA?] 

 

 Did Peter Fink continue to have a design role (for LDA?) after A2A/Form Assoc were sacked? [FoRM (Peter Fink)]

 

C J Pryor: What extent was the extent of their design in put? Ask LDA/Peter Fink

CR Swift:How much of the actual work was done by Pryor and how much by Swift?

  It would be good to understand the process of how Pryor got involved & how Swift got involved & whether there is a history of subcontracting there.. abd all the other relationships between the players some of them must work together on various projects..

(LDA) What was the greatest achievement of the project?

Who was on the old the Steering Committee (compared to the new 'Steering Board')? [Ealing, Members of Steering Gp]

 "contaminated rubble" How was the above mitigated in order to satisfy or calm the general public concern?

How did the engineers influence the design? Were the engineers employed to provide the solution or they were involved in the design stage as well? The later is not confirmed as there is no evidence the two engineering companies taking credit of any involvement. Not in their portfolio, nor in other documents.

What was Rob Cairns' (Project manager) role in the implementation of the project management plan for phase 2?

what was his responsibility, as a project manager, when the park was downgraded?

what happened with CASCAID (leading fundraising consultancy)commissioned to produce a fundraising strategy?

 

 

 

Right that's probably my last post for now as I,m in Lille

Cheers K

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes and Questions

According to these links 
1)http://www.formassociates.eu/docs/LA-5-2009-Northala.pdf
2)http://www.greenfordmagna.info/documents/magna/2007_03%20-%2014%20-%20Politics%20and%20the%20Park.pdf

Rob Cairns (from EDAW and at the time Ealing's  project manager) states that the brief concentrated on the practical requirements for incorporating the necessary earth fill, using water, offering flood defenses, and using an ecological focus.
On the Ealing Council’s Corporate Plan – Draft- Appendix C Update on Strategic objectives and 2005/6 priorities- Strategic Objective: To protect and enhance our environment:

"Northala Fields Stage 2: Second phase of the contract for the construction of a Visitors Centre, Environmental Educational facility, Focal Core area, Playground & Kensington Road Bridge to be delivered subject to securing additional funding. To deliver the second phase a comprehensive project management structure needs to be implemented, lead by external consultant Rob Cairns (EDAW) with help/expertise from internal services and staff".

My questions are:

- What was Rob Cairns' role in the implementation of the project management plan for phase 2?

- what was his responsability, as a project manager, when the park was downgraded?

- what happened with CASCAID (leading fundraising consultancy)commissioned to produce a fundraising strategy? 

- what happened during the "conspiracy" risk assessment? (when the Conservative parties was elected the councils saw the park no longer as a corporate priority but as a convenient source of ready cash. To justify this, the project underwent an uninformed and highly misleading risk assessment)

- could the consultant/stakeholder committee be ignored and excluded from the undergoing assessment?

Could the steering committee be suspended and politically gagged? 

Cristina