Location: Camden, London UK
Client: Camden Highline Charity
Consultants: Coffey Architects, Arup, Alexandra Steed Urban, Rolfe Judd.
Cost: £35M

[ URBAN DESIGN / INFRASTRUCTURE / CIVIC / LANDSCAPE ]
[ 2007 ]

Modelled on the hugely successful New York High Line the Camden Highline utilises abandoned railway structures to create a new public park and garden walk, transforming the elevated railway between Camden Town and King’s Cross into a green artery for London. The Highline will be open and free to all and punctuated with seating areas, cafés, arts and cultural interventions and spaces for charitable activities, to further enhance the individuality of the experience and help promote social cohesion.

Our woven representation of The Highline expresses Camden as a complex series of urban and natural threads, wherein one physically recognizes the horizontal or east-west connections as the warp and the vertical or north-south connections as the weft. The non-physical - the places on, over and between the weave - are inhabited by the diversity of Camden. The Highline is an additional thread acting as a catalyst for nature, coursing through Camden and enriching the environment and its communities with all of the benefits of the natural world. Photographically documenting the proposed route, the walk to the south and north is disjointed by the dense historic urban grain of Camden and the London Overground. The experience is that of pockets of nature acting in isolation, a series of dead ends and ambiguous routes. Oppositely, the Canal offers a continuous linear experience but is itself constrained, offering little expansive space to gather and proving impassable at all but a few moments via stairs, ramps and lifts. Our Highline will duplicate the canal’s successfully achieved linear route but with the expansive, flexible and penetrative advantages of public parks, it will respond to its neighbouring built fabric with connections, access and life. Through intensifying vertical and horizontal connections the urban and the natural will weave.

Where the urban, defined by the enclosed, the workplace, the home, the pet and the iPad, lives alongside the long view, walking by water, observing wildlife and sitting under the shade of a tree. This weaving of the urban and the natural world has been proven to stimulate creativity, to expand minds, to improve our well-being and importantly, those who have experienced nature care more for it, they fight for its protection. The potential of The Highline is to further magnify these existing, non-tangible cultural and creative integrations that are already strong but dissipated in Camden. The warp and weft of The Highline is also ethereal, an impalpable intervention in the city. The camouflaged connections of nature are woven to organise and reveal new perspectives within landscape and engender new thoughts. The Highline will at once offer distinct perspectives - a new point of view - whilst also accommodating and responding to the dichotomies of Camden, the old and the young, the domesticated and the wild, the active and the passive, the group and the individual, the scripted and the impromptu, the local and the tourist. We imagine The Highline as a thread in an existing fabric, not as a super imposition upon the city, at once a continuous linear experience, a spectacle to behold, but also, as with the canal, a series of stitched landscapes that respond directly to their adjacent communities.