Nomination for an Nancye Goulden Award, 2025.

Hidden away down a tiny lane known as Dimes Place just off King Street, is a new commercial development known as The New Timber Yard, because it was formerly the home of Moss Timber Merchants (by Royal Appointment, specialist Timber Merchant).  Having been established for over a hundred years, they moved out to Greenford around 2016, and for a couple of years Dimes Place appeared regularly on our agenda for various reasons, including a change of developer, changes and densification of design, according to the Chairman’s annual report. The site has a lot of adjacency with neighbours all around as the photos show, and the site is somewhat Tardis-like, in that what you see from the street is very much less than the whole.

However, the end result it’s a world away from the hustle and noise of King Street, with attractive planting down the former roadway, taking you to a not insubstantial 200sqm office development, built to BREEAM ‘excellent’ standards, with a welcoming reception area.  Tucked away past the shared courtyard with pizza oven and BBQ are further offices, which were – according to the planning portal – originally intended as mews houses, where the former woodsheds were located between the backs of the houses in Cambridge Grove and Argyle Place.  There are a few more photos on our Instagram

This is what the site used to look like (click for larger images):

Nomination for a Nancye Goulden Award, 2025.

Bradmore Square is a small space tucked away behind Bradmore House on the Broadway, with which we and the Historic Buildings Group have a long history. The back entrance to Hammersmith tube and bus station, and the increasingly popular Broadway shopping centre is conveniently adjacent.  Recently the public realm has been noticeably improved.

The nomination notes that “it’s additionally impressive that the pots continue to be green and watered, even throughout the dry weather that we have been having”.

Nomination for a Nancye Goulden Award, 2025.

The replacement of the bus lane in King Street by a temporary cycle lane during the pandemic was not without it’s critics, including in this parish, given its impact on public transport – particularly with the problematic ‘floating bus stops’ pictured, plus the effect on the public realm – two of our top concerns.

But the recent creation of two rain gardens, together with gravel replacements for a significant number of tree pits on both sides of the western end of the street represent very significant improvements. The hard landscaping and tree pits were done by Conway under the council’s mandate, paid for by the Green Investment Scheme, but interestingly, the planting was undertaken by HCGA under contract to the council, partly by local volunteers.

The gardens are already maturing after only a few weeks and will surely only get better in time. The adjacent gravel tree pits are a perfect example of what the society has campaigned on for well over a decade, awarding wooden spoons to the council in successive years for failing to improve the ‘asphalt situation’ around the borough’s trees. It didn’t seem to take Conway very long to dig out the old asphalt in around a dozen pits, and replace it with permeable and attractive real gravel. These represent what we’d like to see by default everywhere – of course in creative cooperation with guerrilla gardeners such as the award-winning Askew in Bloom, and The Green Project where they’re planting too. 

Nomination for a Wooden Spoon, 2025. The former Hampshire Hog / Hampshire has struggled in recent years, changing hands, names and formats several times, including in the midst of the pandemic in 2020. It used to have a restrained image commensurate with its elegant 1883 Victorian architecture – see below …