THAMES BARRIER PARK – LONDON

Awards: Millennium Marque 2000, RIBA Award 2001, AIA Award 2002, Civic Trust Landscape Award 2002, RTPI Commendation 2002

Thames Barrier Park is the first park designed by the French in England since Achille Duchesne a century ago.

The park created in the new Docks district is a green space prior to urbanization. It is designed on two scales: the scale of an extensive English-style park, and the scale of a garden thanks to the creation of a recessed space, the “Green Dock”.

The park is organized into wooded strips laid out on large lawns arranged in a random pattern. Superimposed on this basic structure is a sunken diagonal, the “Green Dock”, linking the historic docks to the Thames. This sunken garden symbolizes the river, with waves of pruned yew alternating with mixed-border strips of flowers.
It’s a mixed composition, combining the rustic character of a large green space on the scale of the urbanization with that of a sophisticated garden, protected and open to the street space. Today, it is complemented by Signes’ work on the Aquarium in the adjacent Silvertown Docks district.