UoN Architecture students design local canalside garden

Two students from the Department of Architecture and Built Environment have won a competition with their design for a local canalside garden.

The Canal and River Trust plans to transform an area of land next to the Nottingham Beeston Canal into a community garden celebrating Nottinghamshire’s heritage. The charity asked our students to come up with some designs for the strip of land, which sits between the Nottinghamshire Archives building and the canal, just next to Wilford Street.

Tom Cran and Joe Copley – both third year Architecture students – won the competition with their design, The Pit. The Pit celebrates the history of the canal and Nottinghamshire’s mining heritage through the use of limestone and colour-graded timber steps symbolising the process of coal formation. The design also includes a canalside amphitheatre, a viewing gallery, seating areas, bike storage and the potential for a café boat to be moored nearby.

The Trust is now looking for the funding required to make Tom and Joe’s vision a reality.

Danny Brennan, chair of the Canal & River Trust’s East Midlands Waterway Partnership says, “This new layout will give Nottingham more of the kind of canalside public space that you see in other cities but we just don’t have enough of at the moment. It will be an attractive, relaxing space to escape to at lunchtime, a place to just sit and watch the boats go by and to take in the wonderful historic buildings surrounding Castle Wharf. 

“It’s a fantastic opportunity to make a lasting difference to Nottingham’s canalside, and the way in which local people experience it, and we’re determined to make this new amenity happen.”