Wakehurst

Wakehurst Place, part of the Royal Botanical Gardens Kew, is located in Sussex. As part of a strategy for a step-change in business and increasing Wakehurst’s value to Kew, Grimshaw Architects are leading the development of a masterplan to identify opportunities for change for Wakehurst. Momentum has been working as transport consultant with the team at Wakehurst and Grimshaw, helping to understand the constraints and opportunities around external access to the site, as well as back-of-house and visitor movements within the site.

To feed into the options developed by Grimshaw for the Gateway of Wakehurst where the visitor centre, the Mansion and the Millenium Seed Bank are located, we reviewed the existing back-of-house vehicle movements and identified potential to reduce conflicts with visitors by relocating uses in other areas of the Gateway.

Momentum also helped with understanding the pedestrian connectivity to different areas of the site accounting for the levels and gradients of different routes, in order to find better connected spaces for visitors. A terrain model of the site was used to create a 3D pedestrian network and generate journey time and walking catchment maps. This analysis combined with results from a pedestrian survey allowed the team at Wakehurst to better understand current visitor patterns and opportunities to redefine wayfinding and routes inside the site to fit with different types of audiences.