Our Collaboration with Match Landscape Architects

Our Collaboration with Match Landscape Architects

We recently caught up with Jim Kelly, founder of Match Landscape Architects to chat about our recent collaboration project, The Last Post on the High Road in Loughton (pictured above), and how successful partnership makes for better development.

Background

Match Landscape Architects was formed in 2023 by Jim Kelly.  Match is named from a portmanteau of song lyrics ‘make tiny changes [to earth]’, and views each project as an opportunity to bring incremental societal and environmental betterment, to the world we live in.

Match’s Vision

The studio aims to bring climate, place and people sensitive designs, to projects of all scales.

For built environment professionals and developers, acknowledging the planetary impact of urbanisation and the social challenges of population density, is the first step in introducing new design approaches that positively impact the climate and ecological emergencies. To create equality that empowers all people to act with joyful autonomy.

This paradigm shift can be simple:

• fruiting trees and shrubs to encourage impromptu urban foraging,
• visible habitat features that connect humans with their faunal cousins
• access arrangements
• social spaces whose design begins with the most vulnerable users.

Clear Collaboration

Collaborating with like-minded clients and consultants is key to achieving project goals and manifest change. Match share many place ideologies with Clear Architects, which inevitably fosters creative project responses and environmentally sensitive designs.

At Dwellers Ford (pictured below), our collaboration unlocked a challenging backland garage site through the introduction of root-sensitive stilted housing, and an ecology focused meadow with a new channel section of the adjacent River Ching.  This creates both enhanced habitat opportunities and a micro-scaled anthropogenically connected floodplain – this shared endeavour has extended to high street greening, as with our recent collaboration in Loughton, and through smaller scale domestic projects.

Approach to Planning

As Landscape Architects, we find that pursing climate conscious, ecologically beneficial and socially sensitive designs, has a positive impact on the progression of projects through the planning system, by giving local authorities a scheme they are enthused by and can actively endorse.

The aforementioned Dwellers Ford, for example, is now being shared by London Borough of Waltham Forest, as a benchmark project for developing backland sites. This is further reinforced through a client and design team with a shared understanding of a new approach to urban design.

Discover more at www.matchla.co.uk

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