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An Essex Suburb

Part 2 Project 2016
Alec Umecildo Scragg
 University of Cambridge | UK
Based in the periphery of Basildon, the project proposes a strategy of decentralised suburban growth to strengthen existing Plotland communities while transforming the town’s Green Belt into active open space. A master plan for 440 building plots and adjacent municipal Country Club is designed along a series of walked edges which structure the development without the need for statutory design control.

Tutor(s)
Ingrid Schröder
2016
Modes of the Essex home embody a common ideal, or ‘indigenous dream’, which at the scale of suburbia expose its proliferation through either customary expression of legality (the Plotlands) or statutory regulation (the Essex Design Guide).
Exploration of the duality of Country and City, between London and Essex, mapping landscapes, urbanisms and movements between the constructed spectrum of rural and urban.
Analysis of the ‘Essex Man’ stereotypes demonstrates the spatial consequences of a common mode of English social mobility, towards the larger house and rural setting.
The emergence of the address ‘Perseverance’ returns to a fundamental understanding of suburbia as a series of discrete plots whose formation through customary actions of edge making demonstrates the emergence of property through critical questions proprie
Master Plan for Basildon Greenbelt, a series of suburbs attached to existing Plotland areas promote a strategy of decentralisation through which the Greenbelt comes into use.
Master plan for North Benfleet suburb. Referencing the structure of open-field systems, the plan lays out a hierarchy of edges defined through walking, the largest of which hosts a municipal Country Club, bringing the adjacent Greenbelt into use.
The Estate Drawing illustrates the tension between what is defined (orchards, hedges, tree-lined boulevard, the flint fragments of the Country Club) and what is allowed to emerge through custom over time.
Section of the Country Club Ball Room. A series of grand halls provide the key public space of both the suburb and town, constructed through flint and a bricolage of standard materials. The hammer-beam roof is decorated from standard components found at B
Village Hall. The Country Club forms a long arcaded flint edge with accommodation at the corners. Here a Village Hall, Pub, Corner Shop, Winter Garden and Bell Tower.
The Bell Tower. The flint elements of the Country Club assume the bricolage quality of East Anglia Flint Flush work. Each layer adopting a style requiring increased skill, material, labour and time.
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