Arundel Square, Islington, London

Working alongside landscape architects Remapp and structural engineers Price & Myers, Tim O’Hare Associates was involved throughout the renovation and extension of this Edwardian Square in the London Borough of Islington.

The project involved the integration of a new 21^st century concrete deck extension (built over the North London Railway line) with the existing 19th century public square, which achieved an additional 43% of new public space. The new ‘roof deck’ required a fully integrated but lightweight drainage system and soil system that would support a range of plants, including small trees, shrubs and herbaceous planting without a permanent irrigation system.

The existing square was to receive a face lift with new hard wearing lawns, herbaceous borders and semi-mature trees.

At the early design stage, we carried out a Soil Resource Survey for the site, looking at both horticultural quality and ground contamination levels. Whilst contamination was not a problem, the heavy clay soils posed a risk to new tree planting and were not suitable for the high-use lawns. The survey also revealed several areas with severe compaction problems that would need to be addressed.

We devised a Soil Management Plan for the site, which included appropriate cultivation techniques to decompact the soil without harming existing trees, tree pit details, land drainage and specifications for the deck’s specialist lightweight rootzone and for trees and lawns.

During construction, we provided a site inspection role to monitor the main soil-related operations on the site to ensure compliance with the landscape specification. This covered subsoil decompaction, topsoil cultivations, tree pit construction, testing of imported rootzones, turf and wildflower establishment.

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