Arkwood have been working with Lambeth Council on the implementation of strategically located Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) in landscape surrounding William Bonney Estate, Alphonsus Estate, and Teignmouth Flats to aid in offsetting stormwater flooding within the Lambeth catchment. The SuDS will also provide amenity in the estate landscapes and promote biodiversity, and we embedded community consultations at the core of our approach to the scheme. This scheme has been developed in tandem with our Lambeth Flood Attenuation project, which focuses on the implementation of various SuDS schemes within four of Lambeth’s parks.
Client and Contract Period
Lambeth Council
2024 – Ongoing
Project Objectives
Lambeth is one of the most vulnerable boroughs to flooding in London, due to the lost and culverted rivers that carry additional flows during periods of heavy rainfall. Lambeth has a Victorian sewer system that does not have the capacity to deal with increasingly more frequent extreme precipitation events and is in need of alternative methods of stormwater attenuation.
The Lambeth Estates SuDS scheme will create new surface drainage solutions to capture and slow the flow of surface water which will aid in reducing flooding borough-wide. Embedding the schemes into their respective surroundings, we sought to improve existing assets and explore options to introduce fruit trees, wildflower meadows, create planted water retention and attenuation areas, tree pits, swales, natural incidental play, and moments for ecological connectivity to create thriving ecosystem within urban environments. SuDS interventions will be woven into the fabric of the designs embedding amenity value in each scheme. We also looked at improving areas through introduction of new mowing regimes and changing maintenance.
Issues, Challenges, and Outcomes
As this scheme was community focused, consultation and feedback were essential to gage the opinions of local residents and to discover people’s attitudes towards SuDS. This project aimed to mitigate flooding in the wider borough, but also to improve amenity value of the three estates in which the SuDS will be implemented. The overall approach for engagement was to present initial ideas and concepts about what SuDS could look like within these Estates. We spoke with local residents before any designs were created to understand the current uses of these spaces and how residents might want to see them improved.
We ensured that we provided an array of different methods for people to leave comments if they didn’t feel comfortable telling us their views in person, so we had a comment box as well as an online ‘Go Vocal’ page, which provided the insight that the majority of people were in favour of SuDS implementation, while there was concern over funding and future maintenance of the interventions. Although consultation was mostly successful, we received a low response rate for St Alphonsus estate and we were therefore unable to determine what people wanted to achieve in the space. Instead, we took forward the zones that had the ability to capture the largest quantity of water.
Services
- Masterplanning and Detailed Design
- Engagement and Consultation
- Survey and Analysis
