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Robert Buss: Bricklayers’ Arms Consolidation Centre

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London is a world city. It is simultaneously expanding and contracting, growing ever-outwards – and upwards – yet on the brink of divorce from the neighbouring continent. The next generation of designers must deliver fresh thinking to tackle issues that range from the scale of the street to global climate change. We asked pioneering graduates from the LSA how they’d adapt London to ensure that it is inclusive of its citizens, integrated with nature and fit for the future.

Inner-London could be served by 12 consolidation centres connected to a network of electric cargo trams, removing HGVs from the city’s streets.
The 15-hectare building disrupts the grain of the surrounding city in order to make it healthier and more sustainable. It consolidates last-mile delivery facilities, waste recycling, decentralised energy production, reservoirs and workspace for sustainable businesses.
The building creates a plateau at the height of the surrounding buildings, creating a strong connection to the sky and opening up long views. The roof safeguards 15 hectares of new open space for London – contributing to the Mayor’s target of making London 50 per cent green by 2050.
View into the warehouse. Seeing where parcels and groceries are sorted and ‘waste’ redistributed is key to generating awareness around sustainability. Windows into the consolidation centre make a visual connection between citizens’ everyday lives and the city’s usually hidden infrastructure.
Automated warehouse robot technology enables complex consolidation and distribution of goods and the circular economy. A vast grid of groceries and parcels are sorted and picked from above and below.
A public route through the consolidation centre reveals its infrastructure and provides access to workspaces, a new tube station and the roof park. Groceries and parcels can be picked up from self service points along the route.
The project has the potential to have a profound effect on the city around it. Removing HGVs and LGVs reduces traffic by over 30 per cent, improving safety, air quality and congestion; and gives us the opportunity to rethink the way our streets are designed.

Online retail and grocery shopping are on the rise. The fragmented and inefficient nature of logistics, delivery and waste removal services is leading to illegal levels of pollution, the worst congestion in Europe and the most dangerous roads in the UK. While online retail is blamed for the death of high street shopping, the resultant traffic stops us from being able to reinvigorate civic life on our streets.

In the face of these substantial problems, this urban strategy seeks to make the city safer, healthier and more sustainable through tackling inefficient and fragmented last-mile deliveries and waste in London.

A 12-hectare automated consolidation centre for parcels, groceries and waste provides facilities to transfer goods to electric vehicles and robots, while fields on the roof create a new park for the neighbourhood. A light rail system is inserted for mass freight haulage along Old Kent Road. The new Bakerloo Line station cuts a cross-section through the building, revealing its inner workings and connecting to a public market.

The project removes polluting vehicles from the streets, enables a circular economy, decentralises power and water, safeguards public green space and builds for the future of a sustainable planet.