"Located next to the Millennium Dome, the Greenwich Peninsula is a highly constrained development site bearing the scars of a diverse industrial history. Covering 74 hectares with 2.5 km of river frontage the site stretches across the peninsular touching the Thames on both sides of the riverbank knee.
Media City: This is the site of London’s New Media Campus: a conglomeration of media industry headquarters and media education. This prototypical urban community will integrated a diverse programme into an coherent urban field.
What is the shape of this new urban quarter? Low or High? Field or Block? Open or Closed? Unit 9 will test and scrutinise principals of conglomerate ordering and juxtapose it with dense, tall, multi-programmed, ‘closed’ blocks.
The Unit continues the exploration of urban formations and buildings of projective nature that promote the production of new urban communities; projects that challenge conventions of private versus public urban space and contest ground versus building dichotomy." Unit 9 blog
The Site...
North Greenwich and the Greenwich Peninsula have an interesting history and is currently dominated by the large modern O2 arena/ Millennium Dome. The site has a strong industrial element to it and displays many historical components.
As a flood prone peninsula, the North Greenwich area remained undeveloped until the 19th century, when industrial development swept the area. Through good access to the river for importing and exporting goods, it became a prosperous home to rope making, cable making, and the manufacture of soap, linoleum, gas and other industries.
Other industries have come and gone, as have residential developments. Some of the first housing, in the Riverway area, has been preserved, providing a reminder of what it was like in the early 1800s.
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