Stockley Park *

Site on The National Heritage List for England, Parks & Gardens, for Register Entry see https://www.historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list. The Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England was established in 1984 and was commonly called English Heritage. In April 2015 it split into 2 separate entities, Historic England (HE), which continues to champion and protect the historic environment, and the English Heritage Trust, whose role is to look after the 400+ historic sites and monuments owned by the state. HE manages the National Heritage List for England (NHLE) that includes over 400,000 items ranging from prehistoric monuments to office blocks, battlefields and parks, which benefit from legal protection.

Stockley Park, located on a former gravel works and refuse site near Heathrow, was developed as a business park for high tech companies. The site was historically an estate developed in the late C17th and early C18th by Lord Ossulston known as Dawley Park, of which almost nothing remains apart from a fragment of wall on the eastern boundary. An engraving by Kip of 1707 survives. The estate became a farm, and from the early C20th was used as a brick pit and gravel workings, with tipping only stopping in 1984. A scheme for a golf course, public park and science park had been proposed in 1981 by Peter Jones of Trust Securities Holdings PLC, and this was taken over by Stanhope Securities in 1984 under Stuart Lipton, at that time engaged in developing Broadgate in the City of London. A new company, Stockley PLC, was created. The land required decontamination in the first instance. The landscape architects working on the scheme were Bernard Ede and Charles Funke, the latter had specialised in roof gardens and small office landscapes in the City and had worked on the Tate Modern. The golf course and public park were integral to the development of the business centre, which provides 6ha of public open space.

Phase One of Arup's Masterplan of 1984 commenced in 1985 on an area of 36ha., providing the first buildings and landscaping, and was officially opened in 1986 by the Prince of Wales. The landscaping of the business park, which included a golf course and park, was completed by 1993. The Arup team was led by Michael Lowe, with landscape architects Ede Griffiths Partnership headed by Bernard Ede, whose team included horticulturist Charles Funke. The design team for the golf course included Marshall Victor of Robert Trent-Jones Senior, a Florida-based specialist ‘golf architect’. Phase II of the project, The Square, was constructed between 1990 and 1998 on 9.92 ha. of land. Stockley Road, a new by-pass created between 1985 and 1988, divides the site into two unequal halves. 

The total site of the original tip was 131.5ha, of which 37.26ha was the original business park, extended by 9.67ha to the east. An additional 9.92ha added to the east with a higher plot ratio of offices makes 56.85ha in 2019. 6ha were identified as public open space in 1984. The rest became a 98ha, 6,750 yard, 72-par championship municipal golf course, with parkland area, playing fields and horse-riding facilities. The main business park is entered off a roundabout from Stockley Road leading to Bennetsfield Road, while the smaller part to the west is accessed via Horton Road and a secondary roundabout down Iron Bridge Road. The golf course and public park has an access road off Colham Roundabout; the park is also entered via various footpaths and bridleways including a pedestrian entrance at the junction of Gould’s Green and Harlington Road and from a car park near Chestnut Avenue.

The removal of the spoil left a bare site stripped to its subsoil for the business park as a result of which all the landscaping is new. Philip Dowson, one of the founding partners of Arup Associates, took his colleagues and Bernard Ede to study French classical landscape design with its emphasis on clipped hedges, recalling the landscape at Dawley Park as illustrated in 1707. The remaining gravel was rolled and landscaped.

The first and principal phase has a structure comprising two green valleys – one broad and one narrow – each containing a necklace of lakes. They run from a large catchment lake to the north to a slightly smaller sheet of water (Lots Lake) at the southern end of the site alongside the Grand Union Canal. The resulting rectangle defines the core of the business park. Gravel from the eastern part of the site and the golf course area was used to line the lakes as well as to create level building plots for the buildings. Small waterfalls denote changes in level between the lakes and to provide movement, with standardised wooden boardwalks and bridges providing access, while the water course and surrounding banks are extensively planted, mainly with shrubs but with some predominately yellow flowers in and around the water. Around this the main road forms a loop, with prime views facing the landscape and car parking to the rear. The main road to the west is Longwalk Road, leading to Furzeground Way to the south, and Roundwood Avenue to the east, where there is car parking on both sides and single-aspect offices to the east. The largest offices are on the south side of this loop. The roads are formed of brick paviours. The loops of lake, roads and footpaths (see below) contrast with the rectilinear buildings and car parking.

More formal landscape elements and axial devices are used around and between buildings and to create courts screened by hornbeam hedges to conceal car parking (all at grade) in large garden rooms overladen by canopies of whitebeam trees in the centre of the larger parking areas. More hornbeam line the entrances to each building plot. Yew hedges conceal service areas, with flowers confined to areas in and around the water, and the tenants’ own planting around the larger buildings. Avenues of paired clipped lime trees line pedestrian routes through the site, with clumps of plane trees to provide a focus at the south of Roundwood Avenue. Lower shrubs such as cotoneaster and juniper line the paths. Thick screens of native trees screen the Yiewsley by-pass and the Grand Union Canal. The designers made extensive use of planting mature trees after the garden festivals, which saw cultural regeneration of large areas of derelict land in Britain's industrial districts during the 1980s and early 1990s, had pioneered new methods.

The largest catchment lake is to the north of the site, which serves The Arena. The eastern side of The Arena, containing the gym, is set into a bank, cut into with turf steps in the manner utilised by Alvar Aalto at Säynätsalo Town Hall, Finland between 1949 and 1952. A path to the side rises to the golf course. To the west the car parking is set around a sunken arena that provides the road entrance to the shops and gym. Public footpaths extend from the golf course through The Arena to the business park and the canal.
 
Within the business park are a number of sculptures, including Osirisisis by Stephen Cox near Lots Lake, which was commissioned in 1990 by the Stockley Park Consortium, and unveiled in September 1991.
Outside 3 Roundwood Avenue is In the Garden II by Peter Randall-Page. A work by Kevin Atherton, Synchronised Swimmers, was installed in the lake. In October 2014 Stockley Park gained the RHS Britain in Bloom Commercial Award, as the finalist that demonstrated the best environmental and/or horticultural contribution from business / retail / corporate interests.

The 274 acre public park and golf course, Stockley Country Park, is one of the largest man-made parklands in London, incorporating 11 lakes and nearly 200,000 trees and shrubs. A comprehensive footpath and bridlepath network runs through the park, golf course and canal side. The golf clubhouse is open to the public including non-golfers. The site was awarded a Green Flag in 2020. 

 In 2018, as part of a ‘Compiling the Record’ campaign, HE in partnership with the Gardens Trust (TGT) invited nominations from members of TGT and the general public for post-war landscapes that might be added to the NHLE in order to widen the knowledge base and seek protection for a category of landscape hitherto deemed to be under-represented on the Register. A shortlist of 25 cases was selected by an expert panel comprised of external and internal partners to go forward to full assessment for registration. This shortlist included the landscape associated with Stockley Park: Business Park Phases One and Two, golf course and public park, which has now been registered at Grade II.

The reasons for this NHLE designation include the site's historic interest as 'a pioneering design from the early phase of business park development in England and a skilled reuse of highly contaminated land'. The design interest derives from the 'important collaboration between several prominent late C20th designers, engineers and landscape architects to create a business park in which design quality was a paramount selling feature'; 'an award-winning design that continues to be held in high regard'; and the fact that 'the overall site has a fully integrated design with the cellular business park contrasting well with the naturalistic and geometric forms of golf course and public park'. Thirdly for the fact that the overall original design has survived despite the redevelopment of some buildings and modifications to their immediate landscape context.