Make takes over detailed design on Foster and Partners' masterplan for Elephant & Castle regeneration project
Ken Shuttleworth has emerged victorious in his first significant battle against his former employer Foster and Partners.

Shuttleworth's Make practice has been selected by Southwark council to work up detailed designs for the much-delayed regeneration of Elephant & Castle in south London, which was the subject of a 拢750m masterplan by Foster and Partners.

The site is presently occupied by the north and south roundabouts, a distinctive pink shopping centre and its transport interchange.

Make will spend the next five months working up concepts for this space. This may involve residential towers as high as 45 storeys, reworked public areas and new Tube and mainline train links. The aim would be to regenerate a notoriously grim part of London.

The Foster and Partners man most closely associated with the project over the past four years was John Prevc. He was recruited by Shuttleworth in March, and is now looking after the project for Make.

Prevc said: "We've been selected to work up detailed urban designs based on the masterplan: it's the next phase of the development. I've been working on the area for four years and am very fond of it, so I'm delighted to be continuing."

Prevc said it was too early to predict a meaningful value for the project, but it is expected to run to hundreds of millions of pounds.

As well as Foster and Partners, Make fought off bids from Kohn Pedersen Fox and three others.

After spending five months working on concepts, Make may continue to work directly with the council or it could sign up with a developer to pitch for some or all of the work.

Foster was part of the Southwark Land Regeneration Consortium led by developer Godfrey Bradman that reached preferred bidder stage on Elephant & Castle, before the deal broke down in April 2002.

The firm was then called back on to the project in September 2002 to produce a vision for the area.

Make is also understood to be on the verge of winning a masterplanning job in Edinburgh and a job on the South Bank in London for developer Capital & Counties. The London scheme is believed to be a redevelopment of the King's Reach tower, presently occupied by publisher IPC Media.

  • The Elephant & Castle will be one of the key sites in English Partnerships' government-backed drive to deliver key worker housing across London.

    EP's London-Wide Initiative has bought the eight-storey London Park Hotel and will use the site to build hundreds of affordable homes for low-income groups such as nurses and teachers in the coming years.

    The hotel will be demolished and two buildings up to 25 storeys high will be built in its place, providing up to 700 flats.

    EP is understood to be prioritising three of the 11 sites in the capital earmarked for development because of fears that pushing forward all 11 would lead to an overload of bids from developers (see page 13).