Thorpe Park Retail Park Living wall, Leeds

Thorpe Park in Leeds is an established business location with 600,000 sq ft of offices, 350,000 sq ft of new retail and leisure park, 300 residential homes and 113 acres of public park space.

An environmental focus is key at Thorpe park with 7,000 trees, 20,000 shrubs and hedges and 50,000 bulbs being planted. The architects also wanted to make use of the vertical surfaces by incorporating areas of living green wall into the designs which will help to soften the hard edges of the retail buildings and extend the landscaping potential.

GMI construction who were engaged as the main contractor for the retail development contracted with Biotecture to design, supply and install 10 areas of vertical plant wall over the site. Several of these were for the retail units taken by their anchor tenants Next and TKMaxx.

The client for this project was keen to stick to a naturalistic matrix planting design with no distinct pattern in colour tones of various greens to mimic a parkland landscape appearance. It was important that each of the 10 sections of wall were individually assessed for aspect, shading from surrounding architecture and how sheltered the location was to make sure that the plants selected would thrive for years to come. It was also important to the client that a uniformity was maintained between all the living walls on the site so we selected plants that would be comfortable in all areas.

The Living Wall panels were planted and grown on in the Biotecture nursery in West Sussex before they were transported to the site to be installed. Because the plants were already established they had a great coverage and a lush green appearance from day one. The other landscaping on site that was designed to compliment the living wall planting plans will will establish and fill out more over the coming years.

Biotecture have also been working on one of the world’s greenest shopping centres at the McArthurGlen Designer Outlet Ashford, Kent. If you are interested to read more about that project you can visit our news page.