Imagine a new district of an old town, made up of multiple good things. Its blocks of flats, mostly four or five storeys high, would achieve what’s called “gentle density”, which means getting a good number of homes on to a piece of land without it feeling overcrowded. Their shared courtyard gardens, based on Danish and Swedish models, would help foster community life. It would be a place for all generations, different tenures and levels and affordability, of creative work and leisure as well as its energy-efficient homes. It would be designed by skilful and scrupulous architects and engineers, using materials such as cross-laminated timber and hemp to minimise its environmental impact.
Such, and more, is the promise of the Phoenix, a development of 685 homes, 30% of them affordable, proposed for the flat site of the former Phoenix ironworks on the edge of Lewes, the picturesque and steep-streeted county town of East Sussex. It looks, in a land where new homes are largely the lumpen products of volume housebuilders, miraculous, yet it won planning permission last month, and construction of the first phase is due to start early next year, with completion of the whole scheme scheduled for 2030.
The project is the creation of Human Nature, a company co-founded and led by Jonathan Smales, a former managing director of Greenpeace, which aims to “deliver an exponentially sustainable future at neighbourhood level”. To put these hifalutin words in more concrete terms, they are planning to build exemplary new developments of different types: extensions to villages and towns; a “rural community”; a “small new town” of 6,000 homes between Norwich and Cambridge. The Phoenix is meant to be a harbinger of more to come.
Smales, 65, got the construction bug at Greenpeace around 1990 when he hired budding young architects and engineers to convert an animal testing laboratory in north London into the campaign group’s headquarters. He likes, he says, the “tangible satisfaction” that comes with building things. After a period living in a wood in Petworth, West Sussex, “so broke I could scarcely eat”, he became the driving force behind the Earth Centre, a lottery funded but short-lived visitor attraction built in an old coalmining area near Doncaster that tried to educate and entertain the public about environmental issues.
Smales later became a consultant on sustainable practices to endeavours including the London 2012 Olympics and to property developers, but he eventually tired of “sprinkling goodness on otherwise slightly dodgy projects”. So he founded Human Nature with another ex-Greenpeacer, Michael Manolson, where his co-directors include his wife, Joanna Yarrow, formerly head of sustainability and healthy living for Ikea, whose family have lived in Lewes for four generations.
Standing around a big model of their dream settlement, in a low brutalist office block that they have made their base on the 7.9-hectare (19.5 acres) site, Smales and Yarrow speak eloquently and enthusiastically about their plans. They want, says Yarrow, to use “the power of place to create a feeling of what better and different might be”. “If you bang on about what you should do,” says Smales, “you can sound sanctimonious. You have all these Cops [climate crisis conferences] talking about international protocols that mean absolutely nothing to people’s everyday lives.” They want to show what is possible, to “unlock hope, rather than nihilism that says all developers are bad and the planning system is broken”, to “bring people together around something visible and tangible”. Yarrow says they want to break out of “the concept death spiral”, whereby the absence of positive examples leads people to think that sustainable developments such as this are impossible.
There will be a community canteen, its prices kept low by sourcing directly and in bulk from local producers; a health centre, a sports and wellness centre; “Britain’s first carbon-regenerative hotel” and a “co-mobility hub” offering such things as an electric bike service and electric car share. There will be co-working and creative makers’ spaces, and an events and music venue. Some of these facilities will be housed in 19th-century structures from the ironworks, restored and repurposed, with a public square between them. In a process that Human Nature call “mining the anthropocene”, materials from the old buildings will be, wherever possible, reused. Renewable energy will be generated by onsite photovoltaic panels and an offsite renewable energy facility.
There will be no on-street car parking except for disabled people. Everyone else will have to leave their vehicles in the mobility hub and take the short walk to their homes. “To use scarce brownfield land to create Tarmac for cars is a form of madness.” says Smales. Better connections will be made both with the rest of the town and its surroundings. The engineers Expedition, whose senior director, Chris Wise, helped design the Millennium Bridge in London, are working on a new crossing across the neighbouring River Ouse, named after the former Lewes citizen Thomas Paine, who, as well as writing Rights of Man, himself designed a never-built bridge. The site of the new development is prone to flooding, which will only get worse with the climate emergency, so improved defences will be built, also designed by Expedition, softened with planting, with arches allowing access to the waterfront and a boardwalk and belvedere for viewing the nearby South Downs.
The architecture of the new development consists of inventive and lively variations on familiar themes – pitched roofs, courtyards and Sussex alleyways, known as twittens – by a dream team of practices from the more thoughtful and imaginative end of housing design. They include last year’s Stirling prize winners, Mae; Al-Jawad Pike, authors of well-made rows of houses in east London; the hemp building pioneers Material Cultures; and Charles Holland, who created A House for Essex, the holiday home enriched with pagan levels of colourful ornament, with the artist Grayson Perry. Ash Sakula Architects, who designed the intricate and neighbourly Malings in Newcastle upon Tyne, are working on the Phoenix’s first phase.
It’s all very Lewes, a town that combines comfortable prosperity with a tradition of freethinking independence, presided over by the ghost of Paine. It’s not uncharacteristic that, on hoardings on the site of the Phoenix, an unknown graffitist with intellectual ambitions has written ART AND LIFE ARE INDISTINCT and READ JUNG. But if the Phoenix, like its home town, teeters on the twee, that is beside the point. What matters most is that it will, if built, be a wonderful achievement, potentially transformative of British housing.
A bigger question is whether it will really happen as advertised. Its long menu of promises seems almost too good to be true. The misadventures of the Earth Centre, albeit long ago, may cast doubt on Smales’s ability to deliver his grand plans. A previous proposal for the site, by more prosaic developers, turned out to be unviable. But Smales argues that his project’s relatively high density will make the numbers work. “The Earth Centre,” he says, “helped equip us with the resilience, the practical knowledge and even the beginnings of a cultural context or movement that all these years later makes a project like Phoenix possible.” The latter, he adds, is much less risky than its predecessor. The board of Human Nature includes individuals who have successfully run businesses worth hundreds of millions of pounds. Half of the £200m needed to build the first phase has been committed, with the rest on its way, so the prospects look good. Here’s very much hoping.
