As you made your way up Sayer Street, or walked out of Elephant & Castle underground towards the new Elephant Park development, you would have been immersed in the beauty of The Meadow.
Active until 2025; The Meadow was a playful, meanwhile landscape designed for our client Lendlease. It provided a shared sanctuary for people and pollinators within a dense urban environment that is in the midst of huge change and redevelopment.
Integrated with the playful streetscape of Sayer Street next door, our concept for The Meadow was to capture the imagination of all ages; bringing this important node to life through vibrant biodiversity, sculpture, and natural play.
One of our key aims was to encourage and grow our urban pollinator populations. We interwove crucial habitat and foraging opportunities throughout the design: ribbons of wildflower meadow provided by Wildflower Turf, pollen-rich perennial planting and habitat stations.
Working closely with artist Tom Hare, we placed woven willow sculptures throughout. Visitors had a chance to pause and admire the life-sized woven elephant, as well as stop and rest at the towering tulips. These botanical heads nodded to the site's historical use as a Market Garden, as well as highlighting our ecological ambitions of the site for the present.
Site-felled timber and surplus soil was also creatively re-used for natural play trails and tilted landforms. At night, the space was transformed by glowing light installations, designed in collaboration with Michael Grubb Studio, marking the entrance to the park in pops of pink.
The Meadow shared the 2021 Landscape Institute award for 'Excellence in Place Regeneration' alongside its sister project Sayer Street and has drawn in thousands of people and pollinators throughout its life.
“Spending a day in the Meadow during the Open House weekend in September 2020 and speaking with local residents and the wider community gave me a great insight into how valuable the space had become during the turbulent months of lockdown from March 2020. This doorstep playable green lung with highlights of seasonal wildflower meadow and cherished public art brought fresh air, play, contact with nature and an uplifting sense of place to so many people.”
Rob Beswick (Founder + Director, BD)
“Making a space in which people look just as beautiful as the spaces do, places in which the lighting changes the atmosphere of the whole environment in the evening and night - and in turn give something rewarding, exciting to visit, spend time, and live around. We feel this type of lighting gives enthusiasm and a unique identity to the place.”
Stuart Alexander (Lighting Design Lead, MGS)
