UC Berkeley MRED+D London Tour 2025

Seventeen UC Berkeley MRED+D students took part in a week-long tour of various sites in London over the Spring Break 2025. The intent was to visit five mixed-use, brownfield development sites, and one social housing site to learn about their history, meet the architects, urban designers and planners and understand any lessons that could be transferred to the Bay Area.

The six sites were:

1.      King’s Cross Central, the former rail yards between King’s Cross and St Pancras Stations that has been transformed into a new district. The development master planned by Allies & Morrison is focused on Granary Square and the Central St Martin’s Art College in the former Granary Warehouse Building. The development includes a one million sq ft office building for Google together with new mixed-income housing and other facilities.

2.      The Olympic Village site at Stratford was also master planned by Allies & Morrison. Consisting of legacy projects after the 2012 Games that have transformed a blighted part of east London into a new neighborhood around the Olympic Park. The former Olympic Village has been converted into mixed-income housing, together with new sports and cultural facilities that have brought valuable amenities to one of the most deprived parts of London.

3.      Canary Wharf and Wood Wharf. The original speculative office site from the 1980’s designed by SOM was like a transplant of a bit of Midtown Manhattan onto the former Docklands. It has been expanded with new residential towers and retail facilities to attempt to become a new mixed-use neighborhood.

4.      Royal Wharf, Silvertown. Located next to the Thames Barrier, this project master planned by Howells is the most London-like of all the new sites visited. A network of streets and blocks that contain a range of residential building types including townhouses and mews buildings.

5.      The Silchester Estate in North Kensington is a reconstructed social housing project that incorporates a 1960 era high-rise tower and adds street wall low-rise buildings that return the pattern of the traditional Victorian street pattern. Designed by Haworth Tompkins.

6.      Lastly, we visited the Battersea Power Station site, part of the Vauxhall Nine Elms Battersea VNEB District. The former power station designed by Giles Gilbert Scott is the centerpiece of the site and has been transformed into a retail center and offices for Microsoft.  The rest of the development is largely unplanned and has been likened to Dubai-on-Thames.

We met with representatives from Allies & Morrison, Haworth Tompkins, Howells, Prior & Partners and visited the New London Architecture model of Central London. On their return the students wrote reports on what they had seen and learnt.