Valley Gardens by Untitled Practice

Valley Gardens is a 1.5km public open space through the heart of central Brighton from St Peter’s Church past the Royal Pavilion to the Palace Pier. The valley floor is the historic course of a seasonal winterbourne stream, which prevented it from being developed with the rest of the city. Instead it became an urban commons, and then a series of promenading gardens from the Pavilion. The site is a Conservation Area, surrounded by many Listed buildings of heritage value, as well as important cultural, institutional and commercial destination buildings, including active street frontages which reflect Brighton’s vibrant identity. Until recently this valuable city centre space had become dominated by vehicles over pedestrians, creating an unwelcoming and unsafe environment, severing east from west.

The City Council recognised the opportunity to address these issues and open up Valley Gardens with improved access and use more consistent with it’s history as a commons, optimising the unique but underutilised resource on its doorstep, to bring people into better contact with nature for their improved health and wellbeing.

Over the course of ten years, through extensive engagement and collaboration with city stakeholders, Untitled Practice worked with a team of specialist consultants, to achieve the redistribution of vehicular traffic through the site, reducing carriageways, and introducing cycle routes and new pedestrian paths, to prioritise active travel options, whilst also better connecting up the city across the site. Public transport and local access was prioritised along the west beside the commercially active North Laines area, whilst through-traffic to the seafront from the London and Lewes Roads was consolidated along the east. Both were achieved through better traffic management with significant carriageway reductions. This released large areas of space from highways back to the park, enabling a new dedicated cycle route from north to south, and extensive pedestrian cross-routes coordinated with new controlled crossings to link up the urban blocks either side of Valley Gardens. The new accessible infrastructure is set within a remade linear park landscape, which UP describes as a ‘linked park system’, inspired by Frederick Law Olmsted’s ‘Emerald Necklace’ in Boston.

The sequence of spaces through Valley Gardens includes reconstructed garden areas as well as infrastructure-enabled pocket squares at pivotal urban locations, such as St Peter’s Church, for events. These provide welcome leisure space for city centre residents, workers, students and visitors, in an enhanced landscape environment. Brighton has a very active public programme of outdoor events which has impacted the wellbeing and resilience of the landscape. Therefore, soils were fully decompacted and enhanced using sports pitch techniques for better infiltration and tree health. Lawns were re-turfed for improved wear, and meadow margins and perennial planting beds were introduced to mediate boundaries with roads whilst supporting increased biodiversity, along with extensive new mixed tree species to complement and augment the existing mature species, for better shade, shelter and air quality.

Key improvements include:
– 25% less hard surfaces
– 33% more green park spaces
– 650m of perennial gardens
– 33,000 perennial plants
– 140 new trees

The ‘River of Flowers’ is a 650m linear perennial garden running continuously along the east side of the park, designed to reinterpret the memory of the site’s long lost winterbourne stream. It creates a big visual impact, an extended nectar season for pollinators, furthered by generous bulb planting, and boosts biodiversity. In addition to invertebrates, the perennial gardens are a major attractor of people, who naturally gravitate towards its mulit-sensory stimulating qualities when walking or wheeling through the park.

Brighton is part of the first UNESCO Urban Biosphere Reserve in the UK, and Valley Gardens sits centrally between the terrestrial South Downs and maritime English Channel environments, making its ecological function significant. Brighton is also home to the National Elm Collection, protected from elm disease by the barrier of the Downs, and many veteran elms were protected through Valley Gardens during the project, augmented by new disease-resistant species to safeguard their legacy.

This is an ambitious and transformational ‘grey to green’ project that has delivered huge benefits for Brighton’s residents and visitors. Valley Gardens increases the city’s resilience to climate change impacts and supports increased biodiversity in the city centre. It’s prioritisation of active travel supports better health and wellbeing outcomes for people, while protecting and enhancing nature. It’s attraction of increased visitor numbers also supports the local economy, further highlighting the business case for urban landscape and green infrastructure.

Other credits: Urban Movement (transport engineer); Tim O’Hare Associates (soil specialist); Nigel Dunnett (perennial specialist)

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