The world’s resources are finite, yet we continue to live in a throwaway economy. Every year, humanity uses 100 billion tonnes of stuff, with more than 90% of it made from virgin material taken from the earth’s surface.

At our 2022 London Festival of Architecture event, ‘Waste Not, Want Not’, a cross-disciplinary panel discussed how the Marlborough Sports Garden is using Circular Economy principles to steer away from our take, make, waste culture to create a free community amenity for Londoners, improving everyone’s health and wellbeing.

The Marlborough Sports Garden is a rare outdoor space providing much-needed access to physical activity, sport, and leisure pursuits. A new community hub building will help the Bankside Open Spaces Trust (BOST) to realise its vision of a state-of-the-art mixed sports facility that is freely available to everyone, but in particular local school pupils and those who are living in poverty.

BOST and the design team are united in their ambition to make the hub as carbon neutral and circular economy compliant as possible, from the materials used to build the community facility, to the operation of the café and sports activities.

The talk delved into the practicalities and potential hurdles on the road to delivering a truly circular project.

A recording of the event can be viewed below:

The panel included:

Kevin Goh, Project Director, Cullinan Studio, who will give an introduction to the circular economy topic and the project.

Tim Wood, Chair of Trustees, BOST (project client) who will explain why circular principles are important to BOST.

Ian Hamilton, Associate, Engenuiti (structural engineer for the project), who will discuss the circularity influence on structural, material choices

Katherine Adams, Technical and Research Associate, ASBP (leading the ZAP project of which Marlborough Sports Garden is a case study, who will show how we can tackle the plastic problem through research, and what are we learning.