Viet Thanh Nguyen

Masterplanning. Urban Design. Architecture.

Somerstown Urban Room, RIBA Studio Certificate, Portsmouth

October 2021

In 2014, the Department of for Culture, Media and Sports commissioned the renowned architect Sir Terry Farrell to undertake the UK government’s first independent architecture report. One of the recommendations in the Farrell Review was that every town and city without an architecture and built environment centre should have an “urban room” where the past, present and future of that place can be inspected.

Following the Portsmouth Phoenix event in March 2020, the need for a permanent platform for community engagement to discuss the future of Somerstown became clearer than ever. The School of Architecture in partnership with Makers Guild was taking a proactive lead in forming an urban room for the Somerstown area of the city of Portsmouth.

In the wake of the Grenfell Fire, in 2018, the two council housing towers of Horatia House and Leamington House in Somerstown were investigated and deemed unsafe for their use of Large Panel System and structural integrity 800 residents from their 272 apartments were then evacuated.

Gone with the residents was not just the housing stock that was currently in high demand, it was also the communities that had been established since the tower completion in 1965. At the Portsmouth Phoenix attended by the former residents, many mentioned the ground floor community room of each tower where they maintained their tight community. The future urban room would also need to serve a wider audience of Somerstown.

Further studies of the wider area of Somerstown around the two towers would reveal other typical issues of post-war developments: the fragmentation of the urban fabric, the loss of historic edges and thresholds, and the confusing sense of orientation.

As Hisham Matar wrote in ‘A month in Siena’:

I suddenly felt I understood, and could see from Siena’s point of view that infinity is a claustrophobic prospect, that it is perfectly appropriate, given the chaotic nature of life, to cordone off an area in which to interpret ourselves, where one can decide what is important, what is to be previleged and what is to be left out, determine the axes of the main thoroughfares and the arrangement of streets between them.

We often hear a narrative around the breaking down of boundaries these days but actually thresholds and boundaries are really important for the identification of realms/ neighbourhood within cities and to give identities. How we redefine thresholds and boundaries so we are aware that we are passing from one part of the city to another.

This design project revolved around the theme of boundaries and thresholds in various levels, from the city scale to the personal scale. The project was led by a strong social agenda. It proposed to create a permanent platform in forms of an urban room to carry on the discussions about the past, present and future of Somestown. It aimed to grasp the changes in Somerstown, as well as Portsmouth, as an opportunity and propose to restitch the traditional urban grain by envisioning a relatable structure where citizens can be heard and seen.

The urban room at the site of Horatia House was explored in detail to demonstrate how it could respond to specific site constraints. This would be a place where former and new residents of Somerstown gather, and experience the city and nature in a new perspective. The Somerstown Urban Room would also have a clear sustainability agenda in favour of using timber as the main material and reusing the demolition waste from Horatia House wherever possible.