PROJECT: Central Foundation Girls School, Tower Hamlets
SECTORS: Commercial / Education
SERVICES: Landscape Design & Construction
CLIENT: G4S

After successfully conducting the Feasibility Study & Masterplanning of the School’s exterior spaces, the CFGS instructed D F Clark Contractors to provide hard & soft detailed design and proceed to construction stage.

The design of this extensive and multi-use site had to achieve equally multiple goals providing a space dedicated to inspiring young women towards a healthy lifestyle.

The design remediates existing operational malfunctions, most importantly the circulation and congestion issues due to the ‘bottle neck effect’ experienced at the end of break times thus causing crowd safety issues. The crowd control barriers were designed as a sculptural intervention of decorative posts, following the curves of paths & benches, stopping and reappearing in a manner that enabled the space to be used but forced the students to break into smaller groups when entering the building. The new fixed barriers to queuing areas were of the same material and design language linking the different user areas within the space.

All furniture was bespoke, designed by the D F Clark design team to follow the curves and angles of the paths and constructed of timber. Decorative boulders were also used for seating within the artificial grassed areas.

In terms of realisation, the most significant challenge was to conduct and complete the works within the school’s summer holidays and half terms. To accomplish that, the works were broken down into independent phases, planned and completed individually to ensure no school activities were withheld or interrupted.