Tustin Estate 2

Located at the junction of the Old Kent Road and Illderton Road, the 1960-built Tustin estate includes 529 homes, a number of shops, restaurants and community facilities and Pilgrims’ Way Primary School. The estate’s renewal will add over 500 new homes and a re-built primary school with integrated mixed-use commercial and community facilities set around a new shared public space: ‘Tustin Common’.

The project is being delivered through a pioneering, co-design process where options are shared with the community and then whittled down to a preferred option which was put to a resident’s ballot in 2021. A high turnout of 64% of residents voting on the scheme was achieved, with 86.6% voting in favour of redevelopment.

Forming part of the London Borough of Southwark’s ‘Great Estates’ programme, the project is being driven by the estate’s existing community who developed their own manifesto and govern by a ‘Resident’s Project Group’.

An active engagement strategy with residents, business owners and the school has been at the heart of the design development for the scheme. This process of engagement has maximised opportunities for the design team to develop options alongside members of the local community, including those often excluded from conventional consultation processes.

We established a community café on the estate where residents could come for a free hot drink, a biscuit and a one-to-one chat with council officers and the design team. Other methods of engagement with residents of the estate have included a mobile coffee cart, day trips for residents to visit other estates, workshops with

School pupils to engage in what facilities might be needed, garden workshops with residents and events catering for young members that included youth career advice and how the development might be seen in parallel with the local economy and new job opportunities.

As part of the development of the estate we looked at how the existing school’s large site might be made more efficient and how the replacement of the building might deliver a denser ‘mixed-use’ school building.

The design options considered how the school might be allowed to expand in the future to accommodate greater pupil numbers and the benefits of this future provision being built at the outset and used for community start-ups and charitable uses until such a point the school needed the spaces.