"Our ambition is to work in a context where we will be able to properly develop designs with a 'governence fuelled' community engagement agenda, rather than as consultants who deliver community engagement as an optional extra."
civic blog
What we are up to, and what stage our projects are at
July 2011
Our first public artwork in Scotland was completed last week. A range of ideas for public artworks were developed through widespread community engagement as part of the Sustrans Connect2 Cycling and Walking network with Perth and Kinross Council.
July 2011
Dan is giving a talk about the Gamlingay Eco Hub at Design Council CABE on 6 July. The talk is entitled Community Recharge and is part of DesignCouncil CABE's seminar on neighbourhood planning and climate change.
July 2011
Hutchinsons Builders of Potton, will be novated to the Eco Hub after the original contrator declared themselves insolvent in April. Hutchinsons are already preparing to restart works on 18th July following a two month delay. The project now aims to complete in December 2011. As with three other main suppliers to the project who are based within 10 miles of the site, Hutchinsons are extremely local. They hail from the next village.
May 2011
civic is 5! Many thanks to everyone who helped us celebrate on 18th.
May 2011
Building Design magazine have published a double page article focussing on the Technical and Sustainability related aspects of our Gamlingay Eco Hub. Click here to see the latest ...
June 2011
The first of our public artworks for the Perth Pathways project in Scotland is under construction and looking good. civic was appointed back in October as Public Artist on the Sustrans Connect2 Cycling and Walking network to develop ideas for public artworks through widespread community engagement.
March 2011
Dan is working with Dean Court Community Centre Association based on the outskirts of Oxford to help re-model a 1968 social club for use as a 21st Century Community Facility for Pinnocks Way and Cumnor Parish. The existing building is a good example of many similar Alvar Aalto influenced red brick, mono-pitch buildings that were built by local authorities in community settings across the UK in the late 60's and 70's.
October 2010
Andy has been appointed as Public Artist on the Sustrans Connect2 Cycling and Walking network in Perth. We will be developing a range of public artworks through widespread community engagement between now and the end of March 2011.
Tuesday 10th June
Dan has been invited to teach Architecture at Oxford Brookes University starting in September, and will be assisting Harriet Harris as Diploma School unit tutor for Design Studio 2.
Tuesday 8th June
Our competition winning designs for Sandygate Square in Burnley have featured at the launch of a prospectus for developers published by Burnley Borough Council supported by Regenerate Pennine Lancashire today. The launch of the prospectus anticipates a forthcoming OJEU notice calling for developers' expressions of interest, in the next few weeks.
Tuesday 20th May
We are delighted to have been shortlisted for interview, having got down to the last two, to design a tea house and environs project for the RSPB at their headquarters in Sandy. Interviews take place today.
Tuesday 19th May 2010
Dan has delivered his first day long training event as a Play Shaper facilitator today. The event was held with Portsmouth City Council staff from a wide array of departments interested in improving children's and young people's access to high quality play experiences.
Thursday 19th March 2009
We are delighted to have won the Pennine Lancashire Squared international design competition for Burnley. Nearly 80 firms entered the competition to redesign six town squares across East Lancashire. Other contest sites included Accrington, Blackburn, Bacup, Clitheroe and Nelson. A council spokesman said our design was the first choice of a substantial majority of assessment panel members. Click here to see our design ...
December 2008
Dan joins Andy as a CABE Space enabler after being invited onto CABE's Public Space Enabling Scheme in the latest round of recruitment. civic has also been made a Corporate Enabler.
Thursday 18th December
We have been short-listed for a public art competition in Dublin, in collaboration with Artist Kevin Carter. The commission is a public art work at the Cornmarket, that incorporates an urban screen and creates a public viewing space.
Monday 24th November
Our Arsenal Greenspace project appears in the winter 2008 edition of Green Places, as part of the 'Review of the Year'. The article is entitled 'A Sense of Place' and includes recent photographs of the completed project.
Friday 14th November
We have been invited by Lancashire County Library and Information Service to tender for the role of Creative Practitioner and Idea Generator. The project aims to attract young, media-savvy people into libraries by providing a dedicated Youth Space for 14-26 year olds in three library locations across Lancashire. The Library Service's ambition is to capture youth spirit and distil it into physical space for everyday use.
Monday 27th October
We have just returned from our fourth anual office trip to see buildings and places that inspire us. This year's trip was to Amsterdam to see public spaces next to housing, in and amongst Amsterdam's newly regenerated dock areas. Previous years' trips have been to Germany, Portugal and Finland.
Thursday 16th October
Two drawings and a photograph from our work on the Burnley Public Art Project with Artist Kevin Carter, have been selected to appear in an Exhibition called "The Great Purpose", curated by an artist working and studying at the University of East London called Sian Harris. The exhibition brings together work by 28 Artists including Turner Prize nominee Richard Wilson, working across a range of different media that respopnds to the idea that landscape art plays a pivotal role in our sense of identity and belonging. The exhibition starts today and runs for three weeks at The Arts Pavilion, Mile End Park, East London.
Wednesday 1st October
We have just won a competitive selection process to redevelop an existing community centre in Gamlingay, South Cambridgeshire, for a community and voluntary organisation called Forward Gamlingay! The new project will combine refurbishment and new build elements to enable the existing building to be re-used. The new 'Eco Hub' will be designed as a demonstration of the ideals of environmental sustainability.
Friday 26th September
We have been short-listed for an international design competition in Pennine Lancashire in collaboration with a team comprising Colour:Urban Design; Nayan Kulkarni (NK Projects); a community review panel, Summers-Inman cost consultants; Price and Myers structural engineers; and Arups. The Pennine Lancashire Squared competition aims to redesign six town squares across East lancashire, with contest sites in Burnley, Accrington, Blackburn, Bacup, Clitheroe and Nelson. Nearly 80 firms entered the competition, and a shortlist of five practices was drawn up for each of the six towns. Our team bagged a place in Burnley.
Wednesday 17th September
We have published concept designs for a new 'therapeutic garden' commissioned by Islington Council, that will close off an existing one way street along side Moorfields Eye Hospital in London. The initial designs propose a new stress relieving urban space for patients, parents, staff and local residents that is dominated by a snaking row of pleached Beech trees (trees trained to grow in a single flat plane), creating a series of small ‘garden rooms’ for people to sit in.
Monday 28th July
We have been commissioned to develop initial design ideas for a series of joined rear gardens behind an important Grade 2 listed Georgian terrace in Cable Street, East London, for Newlon Housing Trust. The ideas will be shown to residents during a specially proposed garden party, later in the summer, to develop their ambitions for the walled gardens. The south-facing spaces will become a key social area and will need to interlock a diverse range of residents' needs and interests.
Tuesday 22nd July
The soft landscaping at the Open Space project is becoming well established after its first growing quarter and is undergoing some timely maintenance before being adopted by the Local Authority’s Greenspace team. We have visited the site over several weekends and have been pleased to see large numbers of local children and adult residents enjoying the space - sitting on the kidney shaped beds as intended and relaxing under the shade of the deciduous trees along the western edge of the grass meadows.
Monday 31st March
The Open Space design at Lough Road West has been completed and is awaiting formal handover to the Local Authority once the stainless steel benching has been installed. We expect to see the oak trees coming into leaf in about the third or fourth week of April, and that by this time the wild grass seed will have established itself sufficiently before the summer months.
Monday 17th March
We have been commissioned by London Borough of Islington to design a 'therapeutic garden' outside the new Moorfields Eye Hospital building on Peerless Street. The design will close off an existing one way street and provide a new urban space for use by patients, parents and staff from Moorfields, the neighbouring Primary School and local residents.
Thursday 21st February
We have just won a commission to act as Salford's Building Schools for the Future Engagement Champion tasked with ensuring that schools have a legitimate voice in their dealings with the BSF bidding consortia, and that the procurement process is sufficiently agile to accommodate wide spread community engagement.
Friday 8th February
civic's community engagement work in Burnley has helped Burnley Borough Council win a commendation in the 2007 Royal Town Planning Institute National Awards. This work was awarded a Royal Town Planning Institute, North West Regional Award back in October, for Community Engagement in Area Action Plans.
Monday 21st January
London based NDC, Shoreditch Trust, have appointed civic to deliver a five part course of urban realm design training for residents living on the Wenlock Barn Estate in Hackney. civic has been installed as a unique supplier because of our past experience of working with NDC residents on urban design.
Tuesday 15th January
civic's masterplanning and capacity building training for Charlestown and Lower Kersal NDC last summer has been entered for an Academy for Sustainable Communities (ASC) Creating the Future 2008 award, in the category of Innovative Engagement. Since the training, C&LK NDC have hosted a very successful Masterplanning event in October followed by the People's Panel in November 07. We are assured that the success was in no small part due to the confidence and knowledge that many of the residents had picked up from the training.
Thursday 13th December
We have secured funding from Lancashire County Council, and Elevate East Lancashire, to firm-up our proposals to group together all community involvement projects in the county, under a single design forum called the Lancashire Design Academy
Thursday 29th November
civic has been commissioned by the Victoria & Albert Museum (London) in partnership with the Royal Institute of British Architects to develop 'Searching the Collections', a learning programme to improve access for schools and the general public to the V&A's Architecture collection. 'Searching the Collections' will include a new event that makes use of the museum building itself, as a learning resource
Monday 26th November
On Monday 28 January Dan will be talking at CABE about delivering high design ambition in the field of community design. The talk will focus on three projects: 'Landform', an open space project that uses not only the space but the material that is left behind after demolition, in this case linked to Housing Market Renewal in East Lancashire; and civic's two public realm projects as part of the Arsenal regeneration project in North London - one homezone, one greenspace, both linked
Friday 26th October
civic has a new employee! Ian Kenning. Ian was project manager to a group of residents from Ravenscliffe, in Bradford, and helped them get skilled up and raise £2.5M to build a new Communtiy Centre on their estate. Ian will be based in Leeds and takes civic's first steps towards realising a - sometime mooted - 'civic north' office!
Friday 24th October
We have just returned from our third anual office trip to see buildings and places that inspire us. This year's trip was to Berlin to see workers' housing from the 20's - among other better known projects. Previous years' trips have been to Portugal and Finland. In all cases, the buildings we like have ingredients of what we think it is to be ambitious about community design.
Friday 19th October
We are delighted that civic's community engagement work in Burnley has helped Burnley Borough Council win a Royal Town Planning Institute, North West Regional Award, for Community Engagement in Area Action Plans. This work is one of 32 submissions short-listed for the National RTPI Planning Award 2007, the results of which will be announced at the awards presentation taking place at the London Hilton on Thursday 7 February 2008
Friday 12th October
Andy is now a CABE Space enabler after being co-opted onto the team that will deliver CABE's 'Support for School Grounds' initiative
Monday 8th October
Our two schemes for Arsenal football club have got the green light to start on site, and will be finished in Spring 2008
Wednesday 29th August
Our Community Resource Centre in Tidworth - on the edge of Salisbury Plain - has been given outline planning permission
Wednesday 4th July
We have been invited by Mid Pennine Arts to speak at a conference for young people aged 15 to 17 years old, in Lancashire. The conference is entitled 'Imagine a Future'
Thursday 22nd February
Our youth design project in Gamlingay has been used as a design exemplar to illustate the latest CABE guide 'It's Our Space', a guide for community groups wanting to improve outdoor spaces
above: Perth Cycle Stands - civic's first public artwork in Scotland is complete.
above: Gamlingay Eco Hub - the dance hall superstructure is complete and works have re-started on site.
above: Perth Bicycle Stands - our first public artwork in Scotland is nearing completion.
above: Eco Hub in BD - an article about the technical and sustainability aspects of our Hub project came out May 13.
above: Sandygate Square - a new town square for Burnley where we have just won the Pennine Lancashire Squared international design competition.
above: Gamlingay Community Centre as existing. The redeveloped 'Eco Hub' will be designed as a demonstration of the ideals of environmental sustainability.
above: Sandygate Mill, Burnley, where we have been short-listed for stage two of the Pennine Lancashire Squared design competition.
above: Our concept designs for a 'therapeutic garden' in the London Borough of Islington.
above: We are developing ideas for a communal walled garden for housing association tennants of a grade 2 listed Georgian terrace in East London.
above: The soft landscaping at the Open Space project is starting to get established.
above: Our Arsenal green space project at Lough Road has been completed.
above: We are about to start a new demand led process to replace a road with a therapeutic garden outside Moorfields eye hospital.