Visit to Upton

Last Thursday we had a chance to walk around the Upton community, analyse design codes and briefly view buildings at early stages of construction.

Upton has a very unique style whether it's a planned and calculated approach or just a mix of different developers. it did a good job in modernising British developments.

Access and Layout.

First of all the layout of the community is well thought about, the roads are organized, there are plenty of parking spaces on the side, rarely you will come into one way traffic road caused by cars parked on one side of the road. The terrain of the roads makes the drivers think about speed, from asphalt to brick speed bumps and so on. A lot of the roads are separated from the pavements by a barrier which blends into the area nicely. Overall the access to houses and layout of the community is functional. Which gives you impression that Upton segregates different types of social classes. Buildings on the north are very simple and dense. Certainly entering Upton you'd expect the planners to show off their best designs, instead you have to drive through the place.

Design Codes

Upton approach to design codes is interesting in a sense that there was a number of different developers which is evident in various style of the housing in Upton. Different materials and styles were incorporated, for instance some buildings have large glass facades others just regular size windows, some buildings are build by the mixture of timber, stone and brick whereas others are just made out of brick. Towards the south, just across the park you can see spectacular housing, overhanging structure, some areas dense whereas other isolated from neighbouring buildings. Although interesting, materials decay is evident, some buildings were in process of repainting, cladding but wood showed evident signs of weathering. Some housing spanning 50 or so meters had a glass facade, this misled me to think it was a school or some public place when looked from distance, but having a closer look at the buildings it was a solar passive housing, saving energy but at the same time displaying the mess of the residents which was very disappointing.

There was other issues that I have picked on and this is mainly to SXLLM​do with the large glass facades and windows. Unless you are qualified window cleaner or at least know what you're doing you can do a good job maintaining the state of the windows. If an average person had lived in the community and didn't manage to maintain their windows they would be looking having their windows cleaned by specialists which again faces the issue freedom to your own property, you'd be relying on other people carrying out services that was before such an easy job.

Other key issue is garage and storage areas throughout the community, there are plenty of land to explore on your bicycle and what not, but again unless you live on the south side you pretty much can't commit to certain exercises, garages are not there for the residents and gardens are tiny and very exposed to the community.