Westway Trust Lands

Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

In 2014, the Westway Trust embarked upon a programme of improvements to its estate (on lease from Transport for London) located under and adjacent to the elevated section of the A40. This land has been held in trust for the benefit of local people, since 1972 and now has a wide variety of uses including parkland, a children’s nursery and one of the most frequented sports centres in London.

As part of this endeavour Biodiversity by Design combined forces with Studio Engleback (as an informal but regular collaboration called Savia Nueva) to develop an Ecosystem Services and Biodiversity Strategy on behalf of the Westway Trust in line with national, metropolitan and local planning policy.

We based the production of the strategy on a robust combination of fieldwork and desk research, consultation with interested parties and a pragmatic approach to the characterisation of ecosystem services in keeping with the remit and scale of the commission.

We set out guidance for greater provision of ecosystem services in all redevelopment activities both in the short term (potential ‘quick wins’) and in the longer term. Our key approach was to try to ensure that environmental challenges would be addressed and biophilic design embraced in all new landscape designs, whether at ground level or on built form within the land holding.

We provided a systematic palette of potential landscape interventions that could improve ecosystem services and biodiversity and made a first attempt at mapping suitable locations for different intervention types throughout the Westway Trust’s estate.

We also addressed the related issues of reducing estate management costs, expanding estate management impact and raising funds for both recurrent expenditure and landscape projects.