How design policy informed by practice can enable vibrant neighbourhoods

Last year, while gathering content for our magazine, Public Notice, we spoke with the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) design team to learn about their Design Quality Policy. With "well-designed places" replacing the somewhat subjective term "beauty" in the new government's consultation on national planning policy, we revisit this case study to share the LLDC team's work and their requirements for creating well-designed homes and neighbourhoods.

This case study is informed by the London Legacy Development Corporation team’s open call submission and a follow-up interview with Carla Smyth, Design Principal, and Esther Everett, Head of Design, to better understand their unique approach and challenges along the way.

The Design Quality Policy encapsulates what the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) means by well-designed homes and neighbourhoods. It sets out high-quality design principles about integrating sustainable and inclusive design to encourage convergence for their local communities, including quantifiable standards such as larger home sizes. It is now a core requirement for LLDC developments and is being used as a measure of best practice by their planning team on third-party applications. The policy was developed following lessons learnt in its first two neighbourhoods and currently applies to over 3000 homes being delivered jointly by LLDC and their Development Partners.

The Design Management Protocol is one of the tools set up through the policy, which provides a transparent design management process for delivering LLDC’s new homes through Joint Ventures and Development Agreements. It sets clear expectations around LLDC’s involvement throughout the design process, from briefing to planning and into delivery and occupation (all RIBA staged). This ensures quality is actively steered by the in-house design team and supports the creation of quality homes and neighbourhoods.

Public Practice chose this case study as this policy is a brilliant example of going above and beyond statutory requirements.

This inspiring guidance is approved as the organisation’s corporate policy, so it becomes a requirement within all development projects and is used as best practice for the local planning authority to inform third-party schemes. It focuses on high-quality design principles that push the boundaries of what good design can be, intending to build long-term, high-quality neighbourhoods for families around the park.

The Design, Development, and Planning teams worked cross-departmentally to deliver the policy. Peter Maxwell, Director of Design, leads the design team, which includes Neighbourhoods, Public Realm and Landscape, Inclusive Design and Planning Design Advice Teams. These teams perform both a client-side role as design managers and a design advisor role to the local planning authority. Carla and Esther sit within the Neighbourhoods team, responsible for delivering quality across the portfolio of 5500 homes, embedding their 2019 design quality policy on the remaining 3,000 currently being delivered. At any given time, they could also work across other areas related to assets, including retrofitting their buildings or new public realm projects.

The London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) delivers on behalf of the Mayor of London and was established to deliver the regeneration surrounding Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, London. The corporation’s multi-faceted roles range from landowner and developer to local planning authority and event promoter. The area they work within includes the Olympic host boroughs surrounding the park: Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Newham and Waltham Forest. The Park sits at the centre and core of their ‘place’, acting as their work's starting point and focus. Whether they deliver neighbourhoods or new connections, their broader focus is linking the existing or new communities to the Park.

Let’s go back to 2012. The Olympics and Paralympics had been delivered, and stitching this new area back into the existing city was now a new challenge. Following the Games, the team developed a masterplan - The Legacy Communities Scheme, which set out the development that LLDC, as the landowner, would deliver around the park, including c.7,000 new homes and their distribution across five neighbourhoods. At the same time, the 2012 Design Quality Policy was written, which focused on processes and how to deliver good quality design, establishing a framework for architects.

By 2018, LLDC had two new neighbourhoods with 2500 homes in contract, developers on board and the first two phases of over 450 homes in Chobham Manor had been delivered.

The team learned lessons from this development, including how quality was delivered from the planning permission into construction and eventual occupation. They also reflected on how this project connected with the existing East Village and how the types and sizes of housing could help address overcrowding issues. One of their original aspirations as a regeneration agency was to reduce population churn, linked to the lack of new high-quality family homes in the wider area. From early 2000 up to the Olympics in 2012, many new developments focused on smaller apartments that didn’t offer local families space to grow and stay in the community.

2018 provided an excellent opportunity for the team to pause, take stock and evaluate what they wanted from their development partners.

They had 3,000 homes left to deliver and were looking towards the future pipeline, asking themselves, “What's important to us in terms of delivering a great piece of city for the local community, existing and new, and what makes great quality homes in the area?”

This reflection of what they had delivered, where they were going and what could be improved upon offered the LLDC team an opportunity to more clearly express how the vision for the area could be delivered.

The LLDC Quality Review Panel had also been running for six years. Carla was looking at how to embed the team’s experience in delivery and the feedback that consistently came up in pre-applications more strategically. These two opportunities, their developments and third-party planning applications, came together at the right time to review and refresh their 2012 Design Quality Policy.

Over the next 12 months, Carla led the development of the new policy. This work included conducting extensive ‘lessons learnt’ research using development projects and working with the Development and the Planning teams to review wider policy before establishing the governance structure. LLDC formed a working group composed of the Directors of Planning, Design and Development and the Director of Planning on the planning authority side.

The working group intended to thrash out and agree on the vision, using Carla’s research to identify and prioritise areas to include in the policy.

Once ready, LLDC’s governance process means any corporate policy needs to be agreed upon by the executive management team, who sit just below the board level. Over a year, the policy was refined and honed through this process, including through extensive peer review.

The finished policy set out what high-quality design looks like using local examples and citing design teams. It provided design principles from the city scale to the scale of the home that support the delivery of high-quality houses. It established ambitious evaluation criteria for appointing design teams with a minimum of 70% quality weighting and requiring diverse and mixed design teams that better reflect the make-up of local communities. It sets ambitious minimum requirements for LLDC’s new homes, which reflect local needs with larger homes, more private amenities, and high floor-to-ceiling heights. Finally, and crucially, it established the requirement for Post Occupancy Evaluation across all LLDC developments.

The Design Management Protocol then clarifies how LLDC’s in-house design teams want to work alongside their development partners through RIBA Stages 0-7 to support the delivery of high-quality design and sets out processes and gateways to ensure the integration of design, sustainability, and social value requirements.

LLDC produced this policy in-house, drawing on their internal expertise rather than outsourcing. That said, there were financial implications connected to the policy’s requirements. At the core of the policy are the measurable standards for increasing home sizes, 5% over and above the nationally described space standards. There was concern about increased build costs associated with the increased home sizes and larger floor-to-ceiling heights set out within the policy. Carla conducted local benchmarking and market testing to build a commercial case and a convincing argument for these standards, which involved taking a range of typologies of locally completed schemes to review home sizes across different tenures, number of beds and sales rates.

Alongside this, they conducted a qualitative exercise to demonstrate what these standards would mean to residents and highlight the opportunity for a public sector organisation to lead the local housing market. The team used research into the evolution of national space standards to shape their argument, from The Tudor Walters Report in 1918 to the change between the London Housing Design Guide in 2011 and the Nationally Prescribed Space Standards in 2015. Looking specifically at family homes, this starkly demonstrated that between 2011 and 2015, there was a national reduction in the size of family homes.

LLDC wanted to understand better what this reduction meant and what would be possible if a home's floor space could be incrementally increased. They suggested a 5% increase, which equated to an increase of 4m2 in a two-bed family home. To demonstrate what difference this would make to a family, LLDC showed how this could accommodate a sofa bed for occasional guests and a desk for home working - establishing how even a small increase could significantly improve a family’s quality of life and give them the flexibility to evolve their house without moving home and leaving the area.

LLDC’s research showed that although commercial considerations would be linked to the uplift, this would be balanced with strategic benefits, including retaining families in the area and reducing population churn. For the private homes, there were commercial benefits; larger homes generated a greater rate per square metre than smaller homes because of the perception that they were more generous.

There was further discussion that the protocol might be perceived as too onerous for future development partners, potentially reducing the pool of bidders for LLDC development sites. LLDC held an internal workshop to review the challenges of embedding design quality in previous Development Agreements and developed an approach that conveyed their expectations in working with partners and design teams to deliver quality.

The design policy is used not only for LLDC’s development sites project but also as a benchmark for best practice to drive quality in third-party applications as a planning authority. By setting out a requirement for all development partners to undertake Post Occupancy Evaluation for each phase, LLDC can capture and continually feed lessons learnt into future phases.

LLDC’s approach to appointing design teams was ahead of its time and continues to be adopted by other local authorities and housing associations today. They committed themselves and their development partners to appoint all design teams based on a minimum of 70% quality, set a requirement for diverse design teams with emerging talent that reflect the local East London context, and for multiple teams to be appointed to any one scheme to ensure architectural diversity.

Their space standards mean that there is now additional space in all of their homes, allowing people to use their homes in ways that better support them and their lifestyles.

This has also influenced the local housing market, with many private developers following suit. Ultimately, this encourages families to thrive and evolve in these East London neighbourhoods for the long term.

This policy is an example of how LLDC has demonstrated its commitment to design, embedding its approach in team skills, procurement, viability, and decision-making. Unsurprisingly, many schemes have won awards in the area, including the RIBA London Award 2023, and continue to be an inspiration to the sector for what ‘good design’ at scale, can look like in reality.