We’re now actually in the basement level, and this is very typical of a London gap site. Generally there isn’t much land left over. And whenever I say to anyone I’m interested in developing and doing all sorts of stuff around property development in London, the first question they always ask is where’s the land? How the hell do you get the land?
There is land around, but often it’s brown field or it’s left over. So this site was originally garages as I mentioned before. But the problem is that these garages are generally quite low. As you can imagine, you don’t get very many two story garages anymore.
What also happens is they tend to be behind houses, in between the backs of houses, so most of the time you can’t really build higher than the original roofline of the garage.
So if you want any decent amount of accommodation, you’ve got to build into the basement, and that’s where we are. Now the biggest problem: is how do you get light?
What the developers CLPD have done, very cleverly, is create a kind of atrium or courtyard effect to enable all of the bedrooms to get light.