Local beats remote

This week has seen a lot of work at HAT on the new public realm projects we are working on for Colchester Borough Council and Colchester BID.  I can't emphasise enough how fantastic it is to work on projects that are literally on our doorstep. We are designing improvements for streets we walk through every single day. 

Even so, looking at them through the lens of a project reveals things I had not known at all. Helena and Katarina, in our team, have done some amazing research into the history and the present day of these streets and spaces. Dredging up old photos from the library round the corner and paintings from the local museum archive, standing on street corners counting people, bikes and cars, taking photos of all the pavement types in the town centre has been totally illuminating. (My contribution was finding a couple of Nigel Henderson photos of our patch in the Tate's online archive - they must have been from when he was teaching at the Colchester School of Art. The image at the top is one.)

This kind of close observation and research is priceless. And being able to step outside and treat every casual trip to the shop as a part of that research is very fulfilling. It's a complete counter to the idea that work gets divorced from location post-Covid. I do love Google Maps like the next person, but it's not a substitute to being physically in space, watching how people move, feeling the pavement under your shoes, hearing the sounds. Taking that much time to just be on site isn't possible when site is hours away. 

More and more I feel I just don't want to work on sites that aren't super-local. I love not having long trips to site, and knowing the personalities and the dynamics in the community with a real intimacy. At the same time Tom went on a site visit to a possible job that is quite far away this week. He did it by public transport, although driving would have been quicker, because that's how we do things now. When we've previously had work in similar places, we've driven. But now when an opportunity to pitch comes in, the first test is to see whether we can get there without a long drive. 

We did a couple of small feasibility studies during Covid where we had to make do with very limited access to site but it was far from ideal, and the ideas suffered. Remote working is fantastic on lots of levels, but being on site is fundamental to architecture. The most difficult bit currently is persuading some other team members, and even planners and clients sometimes, to come out on site with us - I can't help feeling that some people have got just a bit too cosy having to never leave their screens. Here again I am very glad to be working on projects on our doorstep, with clients and collaborators who live and work in the town too. Local beats remote.