We recently featured in Property Week’s Industrial and Logistics issue in a feature on the feasibility of multi-storey industrial schemes. In the article Chetwoods’ CEO Tim Ward reflects on the impact of the London Plan 2021’s requirement ‘to intensify and make more efficient use of land in strategic industrial locations’ on the new stacked logistics typologies that Chetwoods is developing.

Tim refers to the acceleration of online sales by up to ten years caused by Covid-19 while simultaneously “land has been put under pressure from housebuilders that outbid industrial developers. The logistics sector has had to adapt. We are working on projects where retail premises are being redesigned to have more space for product that can be delivered.”

As well as new high-street logistics hubs, Tim cites the example of Morden Wharf, which Chetwoods is working on for U+I in Greenwich, to illustrate how industrial and residential uses are being co-located, while emphasising the need to develop co-location typologies still further into multi-level: “We have massive requirements for expansion of housing as well as needing to protect industrial land, so there has to be innovative thinking on how we co-locate – stacking horizontally and vertically.”

He identifies collaboration as a key factor in pushing these new typologies forward: “The grid of one type of development doesn’t necessarily follow through to another, so on early residential-led schemes, [load-bearing] transfer decks were needed for ground-floor industrial, which was expensive and compromising. That’s gone now that collaboration is happening.”

Tim concludes that multi-level logistics will look different each time to accommodate different combinations of uses – with residential, workplace, education, recreation and even life sciences above a working base of logistics: “One scheme will have ramps for HGVs, others will only have vans on upper levels, others won’t have logistics beyond the ground floor. A scheme may just go straight up or there could be multiple users [over different levels]. We see small logistics schemes below residential, or light industrial going above logistics.”

For the full article click here.

Chetwoods is one of the few architectural practices to have experience in multi-level industrial design, a building typology which is new to the UK. We are working proactively with developers and agents to develop and lease commercially viable multi-level industrial buildings.

We have designed schemes in London’s Docklands area where we have been demonstrating how pure logistics space can be increased by using ramps to create such multi-storey solutions. We have also worked with the GLA on Industrial Intensification pilot studies that achieved 65% plot density through multi-storey typologies that challenge traditional perceptions around integrating logistics and industrial uses into residential contexts.

Our studies look at splitting up and tailoring a mixed-use masterplan to suit its component communities, layering in new uses and co-locations, to create urban fabrics that integrate industrial, commercial, retail and residential uses with new mixed-use neighbourhoods designed and built to thrive.

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