Hi, I’m Lucy!

I’m originally from Brighton and completed my undergraduate degree at the University of Bath. During my placement year, I worked for Buckley Gray Yeoman Architects in their Bristol office, and I am now a member of the FLUX atelier at the MSA.

My hobbies include travelling, festivals, snowboarding and climbing. I think that this project in Marple offers a really fun opportunity for testing imaginative, fun ideas and pushing the limits - I’m excited to see what we come up with!

A fun fact about me is that I am training for a 1000km cycle from the UK to Spain in the summer.

OUR SITE:
Our site, Marple, is located close to the Peak District and surrounded by beautiful views to the countryside and canals. Located in the Stockport Council district, it has a rich industrial history and a strong community spirit, with a huge variety of community groups who are committed to enhancing the town and its surroundings.


OUR BRIEF:
The project provides an exciting opportunity to reimagine the future of Marple, enhancing the existing vibrancy and community spirit of the town whilst embracing ‘big ideas’ and creative thinking.

The core brief is a public realm enhancement scheme, designing a series of interactive installations throughout varied and exciting sites in Marple, which will establish a new route through the town, creating new incentives for increased use of the public realm and strengthening the social fabric. The proposals will additionally enhance and celebrating the existing assets in the town, including the beautiful park overlooking the Peak District, pedestrianised shopping streets and picturesque canals. The project may involve street furniture, sculpture and planting proposals, but the collaborators are keen to embrace any inventive ideas regarding alternative proposals. Our collaborators are hoping that the ideas generated from our project will fire up the imaginations of the residents of Marple, to encourage them to think outside the box about the potential of their town.

As the project is primarily about communicating big ideas which will generate enthusiasm within the community, it will encourage full creative freedom to push the limits of architectural thinking and presentation skills. The project will also facilitate development of software, visualisation, presentation and model-making skills.


OUR COLLABORATORS :
Marple Civic Society was formed in 1961 with a vision of ensuring that Marple would be a ‘good place to live, work and visit’. The organisation takes an active role in shaping the future of the town and ensuring that Marple will be an increasingly vibrant and sustainable place in which to lead fulfilling lives, through projects such as consultations involving the Marple Leisure and Community Hub, and tree planting initiatives. As residents of Marple, our enthusiastic and inspiring collaborators - Joe, Andrew, Greg and Phil - are invested in the potential of our project to spark new conversations about future possibilities for Marple.

MEET THE COLLABORATORS

Formed in 1961, Marple Civic Society is a volunteer organisation of Marple residents, who are passionate about shaping the future of Marple to make it as vibrant and sustainable as possible. They believe that everyone in Marple, residents young and old, businesses and community groups, can help to identify the town’s challenges and offer ideas for tackling them, taking the stance that working together to adapt to the changing world is the way to create a healthier, happier and more sustainable community for current residents and for future generations.

Their projects to date include: involvement in canal restoration; campaigns to protect pedestrianised space; development of a “Vision for Marple” (which has spawned a series of regeneration projects); workshops and open meetings to inform and encourage local engagement with local issues; engagement with local councillors and council officers regarding the Marple Community Hub and Marple traffic schemes.

We are excited to be collaborating with such an inspiring, knowledgeable and passionate organisation!

ACTION WEEKS DAY 01

A great first day for 'Marple Plays’ action weeks! It was great to get to know the newest members of our team - the students from BA and MLA. We kickstarted with a 'human bingo' ice-breaker to get to know each other. After a presentation from the March students to introduce the project and the sites, we divided into teams and allocated each team their site, ending the morning with a site analysis brainstorm.

The afternoon was spent sketching and developing initial concepts for a series of ‘public realm interventions’ in Marple, which each group presented at the end of the afternoon. This sparked some inspiring conversations between the groups and we were blown away with everyone’s ideas and creativity. We are looking forward to testing these ideas as physical models tomorrow!

ACTION WEEKS DAY 02 - MORNING

After developing some strong initial concepts for each of our five sites yesterday, the main task for today was to test these concepts through physical modelling. These were a series of quick test models to allow the student teams to work out the best scale and materials with which to model the interventions on their sites.

This then enabled us to create production plans for the ‘presentation models’, which we will be taking to site for our community engagement day on Monday. The decision to bring physical models to our community engagement day on site was informed by discussions with our collaborators in our last meeting, where we agreed that physical models would be a more engaging starting point for conversations with members of the public, as they are more interactive.

ACTION WEEKS DAY 02 - AFTERNOON

This afternoon we prepared the laser-cutting files for tomorrow and finalised the initial sketch models. Everyone brought their own techniques and approaches to this task, which resulted in a diverse collection of models and ideas.

We ended the day with a short exhibition showcasing all of the concept models, where each group explained their emerging proposal to the rest of the team and we offered some pointers for how to develop the final models. Today’s exercise has provided a great foundation for us to create the laser-cut models tomorrow and we are excited to see the finished results!

ACTION WEEKS DAY 02

3D scans of conceptual models for the five sites

ACTION WEEKS DAY 03

Another exciting day of modelling today! We were preparing the 'presentation models' to take to site on Monday, with lots of laser-cutting, spray painting and clay models taking shape. Everyone worked really collaboratively to ensure that all of the models were on track by the end of the day, with students who were more familiar using the workshop offering advice to those who hadn't used it as much.

We also started to produce a series of posters, which we will be taking to site alongside the physical models, showcasing initial concept sketches, precedent images and site analysis accumulated over the last three days.

ACTION WEEKS DAY 04

Today marked the final stages of preparations for our community engagement day on site on Monday.

We started the morning with a brainstorming session to come up with discussion prompts, questions and ice breakers to help the student team to extract useful feedback from passers-by on our engagement day. After touching base with our collaborators to discuss the logistics for Monday, we began finalising the engagement day materials.

We ended the first 'Action Week' of MSA Live 2024 on a high, with five great models ready to take to site, and some engaging posters to help explain the concepts!

ACTION WEEKS DAY 04

A selection of the models produced this week ahead of our community engagement day on Monday!

ACTION WEEKS DAY 05 - MORNING

This morning we met at the station to get the train together to Marple for our community engagement day. Thankfully all of our models made it to the train in one piece and we’d lucked out with a sunny day for our site visit!

Phil from Marple Civic Society met us from the train and walked with us through the park to where he and Greg had very kindly set up a gazebo stand for us in the town centre. Here, we set up tables to display our models and the ‘community feedback board’, with post-it notes for Marple residents to add their ideas.

We had put up posters around Marple the week before to publicise our visit, and these seemed to have done the trick - within half an hour there was quite a crowd of people around the stall despite it being a Monday morning!

ACTION WEEKS DAY 05 - AFTERNOON

All members of the student team quickly got into the swing of talking with passersby and we collected lots of inspiring feedback and ideas, which we recorded for analysis tomorrow, to inform the development of the initial concepts from last week.

We then split into two groups, with the MArch students continuing the community engagement at the stall, while the undergraduate students, who hadn’t seen the sites before, were taken on a walking tour by Greg and Phil. At the end of the day, we had a de-brief with our collaborators, where the student teams had the opportunity to ask some final questions to the Marple Civic Society members, and reflected on an engaging and inspiring site visit!

ACTION WEEKS DAY 05

Photographs taken by one of our BA2 students, Nicolas, during the tour of Marple on Monday, led by Marple Civic Society members!

ACTION WEEKS DAY 06

Tuesday began with a review of the feedback we had gathered on our community engagement day. We started with curating the post-it notes feedback and grouping them according to their comments, to identify the predominant themes. We then added other notes accumulated throughout the day and added them to a collaborative word-cloud to visualise the feedback.

After reviewing the feedback, we gathered for a group discussion to discuss alterations to the design concepts, and how we could make small modifications to the designs to ensure that all of the sites formed a cohesive scheme.

The afternoon was then spent 3D modelling in preparation for creating final drawings as the main outputs for our collaborators, and starting the final drawings.

ACTION WEEKS DAY 07

A full day of preparing the final drawings and diagrams for each site! There was a great atmosphere in MTC as everyone was looking back on how far we had come in just over a week, and gaining inspiration from the graphics styles of other group members.

The MArch students gave Photoshop advice to some of the Foundation and BA1 students in a series of informal tutorials, and the days ended with some great diagrams and visualisations produced!

ACTION WEEKS DAY 08

Today we have been refining the final outputs and curating a set of drawings for our collaborators. It was really inspiring and rewarding to see all of the work coming together and we are looking forward to sharing it with Marple Civic Society.

We have been busy curating the final outputs to send to our collaborators and collaboratively producing our MSA Live publication. We came together for our last group discussion to reflect on our MSA Live experiences and celebrate all of the work that the student team had produced. During the reflection session we (the MArch students) asked for feedback from the BA students about whether the ‘action weeks’ had met their expectations and were happy to hear that they had all enjoyed it, particularly the freedom given to them in the brief!

We would like to to end our blog by thanking all of the BA students for their creativity and commitment over the last two weeks. We would also like to thank Marple Civic Society for their invaluable support and inspiration throughout our collaboration - we have really enjoyed getting to know Marple and working together to generate ideas for the town’s future!