Wayne Hemingway

 

Wayne Hemingway

 Wayne Hemingway is a British designer, who, with his wife Gerardine, set up the fashion design company, Red or Dead, in the early 1980s.   The business was started by chance when they sold the contents of their wardrobes in Portobello market, and did so well that they decided to form their own fashion label.  By 1999 they had sold this successful label and set up Hemingway Design, which focuses on affordable and social design and "improving the things that matter in life" from clothing to sofas to wallpaper, up to and including an 800 unit housing project in Gateshead, in collaboration with Wimpey, the mass market house builders.

The Staithes Gateshead

Gateshead  - the way it was

 
WAYNE HEMINGWAY on The Staiths:
 

"In interviews and when I do talks I often get asked what do I consider to be Gerardine and I’s greatest design. I always go back to a meeting in 2000 when we demonstrated how our philosophy to put the landscape thinking before the design of the housing on our first housing development. The Staiths, South Bank in Gateshead paid such dividends to the liveability of the project.

We drew on our own experience of an active outdoors childhood and the joy that we were having with our children through being fortunate enough to be able to afford a large garden to make the bold statement of designing the play and recreation spaces before designing the houses. This nearly got us kicked off the project; Wimpey hadn’t heard anything like it. One of the first things at The Staiths we wanted to do was to build play areas that were challenging, creative and far more exciting than a few chickens on springs and a ‘health and safety’ approved climbing frame. We showed the council play officer an example of an exciting play area that we had come across in a wonderful development in Freiberg, Germany made simply from old trees that were left in their natural state for kids to balance on and a generous helping of sand. We wanted play areas to encourage ‘free range kids’. I remember the council saying that they loved our concept of ‘free range kids’ but couldn’t countenance a play area with sand all over the ground. This wasn’t about the danger of dogs and cats soiling the sand but another very strange reason was given. The council play officer proceeded to say that, “babies will crawl around the sand and eat it”. To which I replied, “but that isn’t a problem as we can replace it, sand is only £1.99 a bag at the local DIY store”. I then proceeded to search on the web for ‘Child eats sand and dies’. Try it, it’s not something that throws up any obvious returns, but common sense had already told me that and it was this use of common sense that allowed us to proceed with our vision of a housing estate led by ‘place’ and not architecture."

It is quite difficult to find more images of or information about the Staiths, but I have included this as a high profile example of an alternative to mass housing.  Like McCloud in my previous post Hemingway also stresses the priority given to landscaping the project.