News

Markides Associates attended the 'Connected Cities: Rail at the Heart of Build, Build, Build' online conference on Monday 5th October 2020. The conference was hosted by Connected Cities and featured a number of presentations discussing the future role of rail travel, including the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Markides Associates are pleased to have been part of the design team for a 171-room hotel located adjacent to London Luton Airport, which achieved planning consent during last week’s Luton Borough Council planning committee.

Updates From Markides Associates

This Newsletter could have been unusual, as everything in our lives over the last few months has been dominated by COVID-19. We have been fortunate at Markides Associates in that none of our staff, or their families, have been directly affected by the pandemic, but we recognise of course that thousands of people have.

Want to reduce construction traffic by 75%? Maryam Shakiba and Matt Harris discuss their findings on the benefits of CLT.

Markides Associates have been appointed by Landsec to assist in the planning and design for a large commercial development on the South Bank, in the London Borough of Southwark.

Damian Tungatt discusses what's keeping workers away from the city centre, and what may happen if there's no return to the status quo.

We have all now realised that the majority of us can work effectively at home. As the media likes to frequently tell us, the ‘new normal’ is London bankers safely working from their kitchen tables in our more remote dormitory towns and our need for the office is increasingly identified as the social part it plays in our working lives as opposed to the traditional place of toil we once knew. The office is now seen as the creative hub - a place to discuss ideas and have beers with our colleagues…. so why are we not rushing back after months of enforced isolation?

MA's Annika Davies examines the latest proposals to ban pavement parking in England.

On Monday, Transport Secretary Grant Schapps, announced plans to prohibit pavement parking and make active travel journeys easier and safer. When parked cars occupy the pavement, they force pedestrians to move around the vehicle by entering the carriageway. This clearly presents a safety risk, but it also presents a major barrier to carrying out daily journeys for many disabled people and people with prams or buggies.

1. Work holistically

Planning needs to break out of silos and start to work more holistically - the world is full of experts who are paid to ignore criteria outside of their own professions, but nobody actually lives like that. Health, mobility, social relations, and economics are highly interwoven, and a critical failure in one has a knock-on effect on the rest. When we pay attention to the connections between disciplines, we can design development that is better in line with the needs of its inhabitants and more resilient in the hard times.

Congratulations to our client MHA London on achieving planning permission at the Elthorne Works! This was an exciting co-location project - still a new idea to the area- with a number of transport and highways challenges, including how to secure that vital servicing space for the commercial uses without large vehicle accesses dominating what is also a beautifully designed residential development.

Last month, Savills released their most recent review of the Standard Method Housing need formula and proposed a new method of assessment.

Markides Associates are pleased to hear of another success for one of our clients (Indigo Scott) who received planning permission from this month’s Lambeth planning committee for a residential development of 4 x four-bedroom family dwellings.