Getting around: Icon and Houndwood Street, Somerset

The Icon neighbourhood is built on the original Clarks shoe factory site in Street, a Victorian industrial market town of 11,100 residents. The scheme accepts that many people need to use cars – particularly in a semi-rural location – but aims to integrate car parking in a more sensitive manner, creating a ‘shared space’ environment that provides equal rights for cars, pedestrians and cyclists.

Public squares, housing squares, boulevards, streets, mews and ‘garden streets’ are laid out in a hierarchy to manage traffic speed. Boulevards traverse the scheme from north to south, with perpendicular residential terraces creating a permeable grid structure. Footpaths and cycleways weave a separate route through the neighbourhood and link the site to existing local facilities and public transport nodes.

Parking is accommodated in a variety of formats. All houses feature a garage space, well concealed by timber doors, which reflect the timber cladding of the rest of the house.