Royal Regeneration - Royal Victoria Square - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, April, 2001 by Peter Davey

This modest but sensitively executed new square in London's Docklands is an oasis of tranquillity and a reminder of the importance of human values amid the bald excess and anomie of the area's recent commercial development.

After the sea terminals moved down river in the '70s, London's Royal Docks were deserted. They still contain some of the largest tracts of undeveloped urban land in the world, though they are beginning to fill up with miscellaneous, often lumpen developments, usually ill related to each other. But between these new hulks, there are much more finely honed elements like the University of East London campus by Edward Cullinan Architects (AR March 2001) and, now, Royal Victoria Square by Patel Taylor with landscape architect EDAW.

Set on the north side of the dock, the square is intended to be a focus in a string of public spaces linked by a pedestrian bridge over the dock and one over the main spine road to the new bigger park (by the same designers) on the banks of the river itself. The aims of Royal Victoria Square were to provide a centre of calm in an area of very mixed development, to celebrate the preserved nineteenth-century brick warehouses, and to act as a sort of open-air anteroom for the huge new exhibition complex: the Excel, a dull and scaleless hulk of world class proportions located to the east of the site.

A difficult and potentially contradictory brief has been resolved with directness and sensitivity. Originally, the big brick Warehouse W was on the waterside. Then, when the Royal Victoria was built in 1855, it was connected to the new major piece of water by two finger docks. These were filled in (though water was reintroduced round the warehouse in a previous landscaping scheme). Now, the memory of the finger docks is retained in two long generous white canopies. They frame the view of Warehouse W from the riverside and create a sense of enclosure and intimacy, protecting the central south-facing green space from overexposure to the Excel, and the members of its family which will doubtless rise in the west. Canopies are supported on steel cantilevers from monolithic black concrete piers, so from river to warehouse (south-north), the structure seems almost solid. Looked at on the east-west axis, however, the composition is much more physically and visually permeable and open.

Moving inland (north) from the dock between the canopies and their pavements, the composition is layered: water, hard and soft, hard and water. First, there is a hard strip on which the grey dock cranes are preserved as gigantic sculptures; then the soft green lawn; then another hard strip where stone paving is magically enlivened with fountains and fibre-optic wands which wave gently in the wind and light up pink at night; beyond is the moat in front of the brick and glass warehouse.

To the east is a grove of beeches newly planted, but tall, which give promise that when they thicken into huge hedges, they will offer some protection from the numbing banality of Excel, the west front of which debauches down stairs toward Warehouse W, its moat and the surrounding hard landscape. There could be no more dramatic contrast between the giant behemoth and the new green square. To the east, all is numbingly corporate, anonymous and physically un-welcoming. In the little park, every detail is particular, every texture and material has been carefully considered. You want to touch them, feel them through the soles of your shoes. The place is an oasis of calm human values in an unremitting desert of anomie.