Rowland Byass – Landscape Architect

Project: Don Riverside

Completion Date: June 2008

Masterplan for a large brownfield site on the Don Valley floodplain between Sheffield and Rotherham. The site consists of large areas of former industrial land, heavily altered and in places contaminated. Depiste this, a rich ecology has developed around the mosaic of secondary woodland and grassland that has sprung up on the site over the last forty years. Until their demolition in 2009, this riverside was dominated by two large 80 year-old concrete cooling towers, relics of a former power station located by the river.

Design and management proposals for the site used bioremediation, ecological planting and sustainable water management to create a large eco-business park housing offices and storage and distribution units. Business units are located amongst the site’s existing grassland and woodland habitats, which also incorporate bioswales and designed wetlands which filter and hold floodwater before releasing it slowly back into the river. Key design principles were the use of woodland belts to screen and mitigate pollution, the creation of greenway routes linking communities along the river and tributaries, and the creation and emphasis of sightlines towards the area’s dominating focal point: the cooling towers.

In this landscape, the former cooling towers are recontextualised into a Picturesque ruin standing in a woodland riverside landscape. A 20 metre wide detention canal, focussed on the towers, creates a central axis for the park. It emphasises their status as landmarks and the unique sense of place that they confer.