The Alcove at the Rockery

From the outset, the strategy was simple yet ambitious: to embrace the site's natural assets, repair broken connections, and generate a new public realm experience that celebrates both movement and dwelling. The Alcove replaces impermeable surfaces with gardens, playful landscapes and streamside promenades, while maintaining clear, generous pedestrian connections across and beyond the site. A public-first approach ensures that the place works not just for its new residents, but for the wider community of The Hyde. The landscape strategy extends the identity of The Rockery next door, crafting a sequence of spaces that blend seamlessly into the existing and emerging public realm. Woodland gardens, playful routes, pocket parks and generous walks form an interconnected mosaic of experiences, each inviting lingering, meeting and exploration. Movement is choreographed through these sequences, creating a place that feels as alive as it is restful.

The building itself is shaped to respond to both the emerging skyline of Edgware Road and the organic flows of the Silk Stream. Its 24-storey octagonal form acts as a marker within the wider urban grain, while remaining respectful to the scale transitions of its neighbours. Massing is carefully set back to maximise daylight and permeability at ground level, ensuring a human-scaled arrival experience framed by planting and active uses.

In short, The Alcove at the Rockery reimagines a redundant urban corner as a vibrant, layered place where ecology, community, and architecture are brought into new conversation — a key stepping stone in the wider regeneration of The Hyde community.

Specificity

The Alcove at the Rockery is deeply grounded in its specific context — its geography, its histories, and its evolving social fabric. Every move in the design was guided by a desire to reveal and amplify the qualities unique to this part of The Hyde, while creating something that feels distinct, memorable and characterful in its own right.

The site sits at the edge of multiple stories: the ancient route of Watling Street (now Edgware Road), the subtle meanders of the Silk Stream, and the industrial legacy of the Duple Coachworks and local car yards. These layers of history inspire a language of texture, rhythm and material memory. Stone, timber, textured brick and wild planting recall the site's natural and working past, embedding a quiet sense of authenticity into every corner.

The "rockery" landscape concept is not decorative; it is experiential. Sculpted mounds, boulders, playful thresholds and soft underplanting create a place that invites exploration and informal play, rather than prescriptive, formal gestures. This idea of layered, incidental spaces continues into the architecture itself: podium gardens, communal terraces and resident lounges are not isolated amenities, but extensions of the landscape, blurring the boundaries between inside and out.

Material choices reinforce this specificity with a rich, tactile palette that grounds the development in its landscape setting. The podium is wrapped in a variegated, textured stone mosaic rainscreen system, taking on a variegated light to mid-grey hue. This solid, anchored expression forms a ‘rock base’ for the scheme — embodying a sense of geological permanence — while the mosaic aggregate scale adds human-level texture and visual delight, further enlivened by playful fenestrations and accents of bronze.

Above the podium, the residential block is enveloped in a vertically slatted, textured and pigmented glass-reinforced concrete rainscreen system. Taking on a mid-green-grey tone, this lighter treatment extends the landscape presence vertically up the building, subtly evoking the layering and fracturing of natural rock formations. Bronze detailing highlights moments where the massing shifts or steps, echoing mineral seams found within stone. Across the facade, the architecture moves between weight and lightness, solidity and porosity, always seeking a crafted dialogue with the landscape it grows from.

Internally, homes have been carefully arranged to optimise outlook and comfort. All units benefit from private amenity space, either externalised or internalised, generous glazing, and a strong relationship to the wider landscape. Homes are not arranged in isolation, but as part of a broader system of layered spaces — from the doorstep play zones, to resident gardens, to the streamside promenade beyond. Community infrastructure is embedded into the ground levels and podiums, including a residents' lounge, gym, workspace and doorstep play. The shared spaces are designed to encourage everyday interaction — between neighbours, between visitors, and between the community and the landscape that surrounds them.

In every way, The Alcove at the Rockery is a place that could only exist here — a place that acknowledges its past, amplifies its assets, and sets a confident course for its future.

Sustainability

Sustainability at The Alcove at the Rockery is understood not as a checklist, but as a fundamental ethos — a way of designing that embeds resilience, adaptability, and stewardship into the DNA of the place.

The building design embraces a passive-first approach, with carefully modelled massing, high-performance envelopes, and optimised daylighting strategies that reduce energy demand from the outset. Renewable technologies are layered in without compromise to design integrity: photovoltaic arrays, air source heat pumps, and heat recovery systems provide low-carbon energy in ways that are quiet, efficient and unobtrusive.

The landscape strategy is equally critical. The Silk Stream embankment, once neglected and fenced off, is now restored and celebrated. Rain gardens, permeable paving, and biodiverse planting manage stormwater at source, while enhancing habitat diversity and supporting pollinators. Public and private green spaces weave together to form an ecological network that builds resilience against climate change impacts such as flooding and urban heat.

Active travel is prioritised by locating car parking within the existing car park podium of the sister site and establishing a permit-free approach. The design significantly reduces the dominance of vehicles. Over 300 long-stay cycle spaces and clear, inviting pedestrian routes make walking and cycling the natural choice for residents and visitors alike.

Beyond technical metrics, sustainability is also social. The Alcove fosters a strong sense of belonging and mutual care through its public realm, communal spaces and housing typologies. A diversity of home sizes, including accessible units, supports a broad demographic, ensuring that the community can grow and adapt over time.

From carbon to community and from biodiversity to beauty — The Alcove at the Rockery offers a model for resilient, joyful, future-focused urban living.