Our winning design submission for this developer led competition to transform Swansea's waterfront focused on the 'City Beach' - a unique opportunity to allow city life to meet the sea.
Our proposal to Trebor Developments and Bellway Homes established a new high quality regional leisure destination, to contribute to the regeneration of the city centre. The scheme includes a new Hydro Hub tourist attraction in conjunction with Swansea University's Marine Sciences Department, shops, cafes and restaurants, and up to 600 residential units. The key design principles of the masterplan are:
- Improved access to the beach, including visual and physical connectivity with the city centre to the waterfront.
- Widening the promenade, providing public beach facilities and allowing opportunities for seasonal pop up shops and cafes, as well as public art, to make this place a distinctive creative, fun destination.
- A variety of high quality public spaces that support a greening of the city, including a civic scale space along the promenade drawn into the site as a focus for the A3/ commercial and leisure uses.
- The Hydro Hub acts as a visual marker along Oystermouth Road, a building of appropriate scale and architectural distinctiveness providing the gateway to the site and provides the final piece of the Bay wide leisure offering that will run from the Tidal Lagoon in the east to Mumbles in the west.
- The residential areas are based around a clear hierarchy of streets and open space types creating character, distinctiveness and legibility. The waterfront edge deliberately fragments to maximise the number of homes that have a view across the Bay.