Public realm
Atkins is an innovator in landscape and urban design, with a reputation for imaginative, elegant and practical solutions for all facets of the public realm. This includes sensitive historic environments, both in the UK and overseas.
We focus on finding a balance between retaining and enhancing the rich and diverse qualities of the landscape and built heritage and the continued use of local materials, with ensuring opportunities to promote best practice in contemporary design.
Our work includes guidance and project design and implementation, as well as aftercare maintenance and management.
Our aim is always to deliver solutions of vision and quality that both reflect and enhance local identity and also endorse good practice in a useful and meaningful way. Materials, features and innovations are combined to produce something unique and thought-provoking both by day and night and which is functional on a day to day basis. All aspects of the design are evaluated against the need for flexibility, long life with low maintenance, and ongoing management issues.
We design the spaces around buildings and new development throughout the UK, Middle East and China, including:
- offices
- hotels and leisure attractions
- housing
- schools
- hospitals.
We create, enhance and restore parks and green spaces. These include new parks on the regenerated Greenwich Peninsula, through pocket parks in urban areas and alongside busy roads, to historic parks such as Painshill Park in Surrey and Zhongshan Park in Shanghai.
Another speciality is sea-front and waterside parks and spaces such as our award winning scheme for Hornsea Promenade.
In the UK we are specialists in environmental improvement schemes. We marry the often conflicting demands of traffic management and the preservation and enhancement of the public realm in urban areas of all kinds including conservation areas, market towns and other historic settlements.
At the metropolitan level we have designed and implemented numerous schemes, many of them award-winning, including Trafalgar Square and the Strand in London. We are currently working on major projects in other parts of London, in Belfast and in Glasgow.
Our studies for smaller UK town centres include Streatham, Chepstow, Ludlow, Cirencester, Rayleigh and Chertsey. We also devise solutions for individual road and townscape settings such as the A1 in London, which include existing - or potential - squares, circuses or other formal spatial arrangements.
Atkins has an established reputation in the development of guidance for the public realm. Recently completed projects include streetscape design guides for Tower Hamlets, South Bank and Waterloo, Streatham and Hackney in London. Our conservation and management guide for Covent Garden includes advice on the public realm. We also have extensive experience in the development of residential design guides, open space, leisure and recreation strategies and the conservation and management of the historic fabric.
A wide range of Atkins specialists contribute their expertise to our work in the public realm, including:
- urban design
- landscape architecture
- transport planning and traffic management
- heritage
- communication and community involvement
- planning
- economics
- ecology.