And that is what the Hemingways have concentrated on. When I went to meet Wayne at his north London base - a typically unorthodox studio in a huge 1920s house in Wembley - I expected to find lots of interior design going on, but little else. How wrong I was. They are indeed doing all the interiors, but that wasn’t what was getting Wayne excited. Instead, all the drawings he pulled out for inspection dealt with exteriors and public spaces. “It would be great to have a sign saying “ball games encouraged,” he remarks.
Working with Newcastle architects the Ian Darby Partnership, the Hemingways have designed a development of riverside blocks with courtyard housing behind, where two principles stand out. There is a far greater variety of house types than is usual - big housebuilders usually stick to just two or three types, but here there are many more. And cars and other motor vehicles are almost completely excluded. The whole area of the estate will be a pedestrian-first place, going even further than the latest Government-backed “Home Zone” initiatives or the equivalents in continental Europe. Cars are allowed in - with hundreds of families and a site away from the centre, it would be folly to ban them - but they are kept to the margins or parked beneath the riverside blocks. Wayne has even negotiated special small dustcarts with the council, to keep disruptive noise to a minimum, and has gained consent for a much-improved bus service.
If you look at the designs as an example of architecture, they are not exactly radical. Some of the sketches are slightly gauche. You can predict with fair certainty that Staiths South Bank will not feature heavily on architectural award shortlists. But then, hard-edged architecture is not what the Hemingways are about. They are also a million miles away from the architectural polite-modern mainstream, which informs many of the better waterside developments around the country. Instead, you can see them articulating their idea of home - the recognizable front door, perhaps in a block, perhaps in a terrace - combined with their cherished idea of a safe, happy outdoor environment. It’s a different attitude. The talk is of doing for homes what Habitat did for home interiors in the 1960s.
As a result, the thing paradoxically has a slightly old-fashioned air about it, a dash of 1950s whimsy and 1960s utopianism, crossed with an almost Victorian paternalistic desire to create a “model village” (modern buzz-name, “urban community”) in an industrial setting. Fashion has never had any problem revisiting the past and giving it a new twist for the present, and this is exactly what the Hemingways are up to with their individually-landscaped courtyards, sheltered by riverside blocks raised on a podium - so allowing big raised terraces for the homes, as well as tidying the cars out of the way.
Hemingway freely admits that theirs is by no means an easy task. Part of the problem is not just the stick-in-the-mud nature of many housebuilders, but the materials and methods available to them, he believes. He has scoured Europe for better building materials, from bricks to windows, and found plenty of them. The trouble is that to import them to Britain pushes the price up: but their cheaper equivalents in this country are just not so good. Given that their appointed task is, as Gerardine says, “The chance to address the real aspirations, desires and budgets of everyday Britain”, this is a difficult circle to square.
