A pioneering suburban business park, established to a master plan of 1984 by Arup Associates, led by Michael Lowe, and mainly developed from 1985 to 1993, with Ede Griffiths Partnership Landscape Architects, headed by Bernard Ede. The team included horticulturist Charles Funke. The design of course and public park was developed from 1984 to 1992 by Ede Griffiths Partnership, along with Marshall Victor of Robert Trent-Jones Senior, a Florida-based specialist ‘golf architect’. Work on the first phase of 36ha began in April 1985; the first buildings opened in 1986 and the site was opened by the Prince of Wales in June that year. The main elements of the landscaping of the later phases were completed by 1993. Phase II is of 9.92 ha, and was added between 1990 and 1998.
LOCATION, AREA, BOUNDARIES, LANDFORM, SETTING
The site is part of the London green belt, flat land lying between West Drayton and Hayes on the boundary of Greater London due north of Harlington and Heathrow Airport. Immediately to the south of the business park is the Grand Union Canal. To the north is the Stockley Park Golf Course and public park which was integral to the development of the business centre. The dual carriageway of Stockley Road, which serves the M4 motorway between it and Heathrow was created between 1985 and 1988 and divides the site into two unequal halves.
The total site of the original tip was 131.5ha, of which 37.26ha was the original business park, extended by 9.67ha to the east. An additional 9.92ha added to the east with a higher plot ratio of offices makes 56.85ha in 2019. 6ha were identified as public open space in 1984. The rest became a 98ha, 6,750 yard, 72-par championship municipal golf course, with parkland area, playing fields and horse-riding facilities.
VIEWS
There are no views out of the business park, which is turned inwards to limit the effect of the new by-pass, Stockley Road. Views within the business park are concentrated round the lakes as growing planting obscures the buildings from many of the roads. There are limited views of the buildings from the golf club to the north. The golf course has an undulating landscape and includes high points which have expansive views out to the surrounding landscape, there is also a bridge which connects the east and west side of the golf course which has expansive views to the north and south.
ENTRANCES AND APPROACHES
The main business park is entered off a roundabout from Stockley Road (A408 between Heathrow and Uxbridge), leading to Bennetsfield Road and this is the main access route. The smaller part to the west is entered via Horton Road and a secondary roundabout down Iron Bridge Road. The golf course and public park has an access road off Colham Roundabout which leads to a car park; the park is also entered via various footpaths and bridleways including a pedestrian entrance at the junction of Gould’s Green and Harlington Road and from a car park near Chestnut Avenue.
BUILDINGS
At the northern point of the site is The Arena, a bastion-like building containing a gym, public house (not currently in use), bank and shops set around a circle behind the largely blind façade to the water. It was built by Arup Associates in buff concrete blockwork from 1988 to 1989, with the involvement of leading designers David Thomas and Peter Foggo. On the north side of The Arena building, a hotel is currently under construction on site after obtaining planning permission in January 2018. To the north is the golf club house in similar blockwork, 1992. In all, Arup Associates designed 13 buildings in Phase I of Stockley Park, including the golf club house.
The office buildings within Phase I are contemporary with the landscape, though a few are starting to be remodelled. In the first phase, 1,500,000 square ft of business space was built on the 36 acres with 4,500 car parking spaces. Arup Associates (job architects Michael Lowe and Richard Noble of Group 3) designed a standard two-storey pavilion (the so-called B1, like its use-class order) with classic proportions to a common grid and crisp detailing, each providing twin units that could be subdivided in several ways off a central service spine. The 18m depth allowed good levels of natural light and awareness of the surroundings, and a high level of servicing met the stringent requirements for computers in the 1980s. The buildings were constructed on steel frames with prefabricated cladding and pitched roofs to hide mechanical plant; even the building services were assembled in a module off site, tested and craned into position. The management of the contracts was also designed for speed: Arup Associates had pioneered the involvement of contractors in the design process at its Horizon Factory, Nottingham, from 1969 to 1972, but at Stockley Park the developers also took an active involvement in the contracts. The shell and service core of a building was erected in 26 weeks for £480/m2, compared with £540 for 590/m2 for conventional buildings in the area. 2 Roundwood Avenue was a larger variant for the American toymakers Hasbro, designed by Arup Associates and built from 1987 to 1988. 4 Roundwood Avenue was remodelled by ESA from 2016 to 2018, the most significant building alteration on the site. Other buildings were created at the south of the site by private architects, but repeating many of the ingredients established by Arup Associates. These are by Ian Ritchie and Foster Associates, 4 and 5 Longwall Road (notable for its ‘Y’-framed structure), respectively built from 1988 to 1990 and 1987 to 1989; Geoffrey Darke Associates at 1 Furzebrook Way, 1988 to 1989, stone clad; and Troughton McAslan at 2 and 4 Furzebrook Way, built from 1988 to 1991 (built for Apple, in two phases with a curved roof). The three buildings west of Stockley Road were designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) to a similar pattern to Arup Associates’ blocks.
Phase II, The Square, lying to the east of Furzebrook Way, contains six larger and more individual buildings by Arup Associates (notably 2, 3, 4 and 8 The Square from 1996 to 1999), with James Burford as senior architect, using a variety of styles and shapes around a central square or round core, all with distinctive double skins for energy efficiency. Eric Parry designed 1 The Square using the old long atrium plan from 1990 to 1991.
SCULPTURE
There are several sculptures located within the business park.
At the junction of Longwalk Road and Furzeground Way near Lots Lake, is Osirisisis, sculpted white Diorite marble from Egypt; Stephen Cox was commissioned in 1990 by the Stockley Park Consortium, and the sculpture was unveiled in September 1991.
Outside 1 Furzeground Way is Lot's Wife, a stone sculpture; the date and designer is unknown.
Outside 3 Roundwood Avenue is In the Garden II, sculpted from Bath stone in 1983 by Peter Randall-Page.
Outside the GlaxoSmithKline building on Iron Bridge Road is a large unidentified figure holding a sword; the date and designer of this sculpture is unknown.
BUSINESS PARK
The removal of the spoil left a bare site stripped to its subsoil for the business park. All the landscaping is new, therefore, and Philip Dowson, one of the founding partners of Arup Associates, took his colleagues and Bernard Ede to study French classical landscape design with its emphasis on clipped hedges or chamilles, a nod to the landscape at Dawley Park as illustrated in 1707. The remaining gravel was rolled and landscaped.
The first and principal phase has a structure comprising two green valleys – one broad and one narrow – each containing a necklace of lakes. They run from a large catchment lake to the north to a slightly smaller sheet of water (Lots Lake) at the southern end of the site alongside the Grand Union Canal. The resulting rectangle defines the core of the business park. Gravel from the eastern part of the site and the golf course area was used to line the lakes as well as to create level building plots for the buildings. Small waterfalls denote changes in level between the lakes and to provide movement, with standardised wooden boardwalks and bridges providing access, while the water course and surrounding banks are extensively planted, mainly with shrubs but with some predominately yellow flowers in and around the water. Around this the main road forms a loop, with prime views facing the landscape and car parking to the rear. The main road to the west is Longwalk Road, leading to Furzeground Way to the south, and Roundwood Avenue to the east, where there is car parking on both sides and single-aspect offices to the east. The largest offices are on the south side of this loop. The roads are formed of brick paviours. The loops of lake, roads and footpaths (see below) contrast with the rectilinear buildings and car parking.
More formal landscape elements and axial devices are used around and between buildings and to create courts screened by hornbeam hedges to conceal car parking (all at grade) in large garden rooms overladen by canopies of whitebeam trees in the centre of the larger parking areas. More hornbeam line the entrances to each building plot. Yew hedges conceal service areas, with flowers confined to areas in and around the water, and the tenants’ own planting around the larger buildings. Avenues of paired clipped lime trees line pedestrian routes through the site, with clumps of plane trees to provide a focus at the south of Roundwood Avenue. Lower shrubs such as cotoneaster and juniper line the paths. Thick screens of native trees screen the Yiewsley by-pass and the Grand Union Canal. The designers made extensive use of planting mature trees after the garden festivals, which saw cultural regeneration of large areas of derelict land in Britain's industrial districts during the 1980s and early 1990s, had pioneered new methods.
The largest catchment lake is to the north of the site, which serves The Arena. The eastern side of The Arena, containing the gym, is set into a bank, cut into with turf steps in the manner utilised by Alvar Aalto at Säynätsalo Town Hall, Finland between 1949 and 1952. A path to the side rises to the golf course. To the west the car parking is set around a sunken arena that provides the road entrance to the shops and gym. Public footpaths extend from the golf course through The Arena to the business park and the canal.
At the east end of the business park is Phase II which was laid out between 1990 and 1993 as The Square, in fact a loop of road around a long, rectangular central area that includes a café and street food outlets. Only one building was erected at that time (1 The Square), but the basic planting of laurel and hornbeam bushes and lines of lime trees was established, repeating the form of Phase I, with car parking behind hedges to the rear and screens of trees as a boundary to the site. The rest of the buildings had been laid out by 1998.
To the west of Stockley Road is a smaller part of Phase I. The layout of the three office buildings by SOM repeats the same planting pattern around walkways and car parks as the eastern Phase I Business Park. This site is wholly fenced off from the public and the surrounding roads are planted with limes and red oaks.
PUBLIC PARK AND GOLF COURSE
The public park and golf course, created between 1985 and 1992, have a dome-like form rising from the canal to 60m which appears as an existing feature bisected by the major road; the east and west sides are linked by a bridge. It comprises 104ha of man-made hills, laid out as a 6,750 yard, 72 par championship eighteen-hole municipal golf course, with a parkland area, playing fields and horse-riding facilities. The landscape architect was Ede Griffiths Partnership, headed by Bernard Ede. The project manager for Stanhope Construction was John Cottingham, and the golf course consultant Robert Trent-Jones Senior. The rubbish from the business park site was moved and shaped into a series of mounds, while gravel from the golf course was used to fill holes in the business park.
There are public footpaths and nearly 7,000m of bridleway, and 58 bunkers. There are also several ponds and lakes located across the park, most acting as features within the golf course. The trees are far more informal than in the business park, with alders, poplar, willow, oak and ash. The west side of the park is bounded on all sides by a band of trees. The larger eastern side is bounded by a band of trees to the west, north and east, with the business park to the south.
The golf course is principally laid out over the larger east side of the park, with further holes at the southern end of the west side. In the northern part of the west side is the rest of the public park which consists of a series of largely open spaces bordered by bands of trees and linked by footpaths. Near to the Colham roundabout entrance is a circular area of trees from which footpaths radiate, including some curving tree-lined paths.
This list entry was subject to a Minor Enhancement on 18 March 2021 to amend the description.