The real test of placemaking is not what you build. It’s what you leave behind.
How design can create legacy and shape an area’s story
In real estate, success is often measured through planning approvals, construction milestones, sales values and occupancy rates. These are important metrics. But they don’t answer the question that ultimately matters: what happens next?
Will the development become part of the city? Will it develop a genuine identity? Will people choose to spend time, build businesses and create communities there? Or will it simply become another place that functions well but could exist anywhere?
Districts are ultra-long term systems, designed to evolve over decades and even centuries. So to make them work, the thinking that underpins them needs to be similarly long-term. Because the real test of placemaking is not what happens on the opening day — it is what happens ten years later.
Discovering character before designing it
Coherent placemaking that tells a unified story does not start with buildings. It starts with understanding local history, culture, industry, community memory, social behaviour and existing identity — and then synthesising them into a clear vision for what comes next. The strongest place brands do not invent stories. They uncover them.
This principle shaped Greenspace’s work at Deptford Foundry in south-east London. The site was formerly home to Josiah Stone & Co, one of Britain’s most significant railway and marine engineering manufacturers. For two centuries, the foundry formed part of Deptford’s industrial story, employing generations of local people and contributing to the infrastructure that modernised cities around the world.
There was a risk that this history would simply become a reference in a planning document before disappearing beneath a new development. Instead, we began by asking a different question: What made this place important in the first place, and what would give it relevance for the decades ahead?
One theme emerged — that Deptford had always been a place of makers. The industries had changed over time, but the culture of creativity, production and craftsmanship remained. That insight became the foundation of the entire placemaking strategy and legacy that the Financial Times highlighted earlier this year as a national case study for embedding affordable creative workspace within residential development and using it as a cultural bedrock for a wider project.
When culture becomes a design principle
Too often, culture is treated as a marketing layer applied once a development has been designed. The most successful places use culture as an elemental design principle.
At Deptford Foundry, the idea of making influenced every level of the project. Greenspace created the narrative framework, developed the place, street and building names, and helped shape the wider placemaking approach around the site’s identity. The strategy extended beyond branding — the public realm, allocation of studio space and communications plan all reinforced the idea that this was a place where creativity continued to happen.
Deptford Foundry’s architects, Rolfe Judd responded to the local context and history of the site, drawing design inspiration for the scheme from the manufacturing industry which had been based on the site for over a hundred years.
This was not about preserving history for history’s sake: it was about understanding that sustaining culture, and curating it for the future, is often more valuable than preserving buildings.
Building community before completion
A common misconception is that community emerges automatically post-construction. In reality, the strongest communities are established long before residents move in.
Before redevelopment at Deptford Foundry even began, Greenspace created Deptford Stories, a meanwhile cultural programme that invited local creatives and organisations to engage with the site and contribute to its evolving identity. This was the critical first step in engaging with what would become the founding community.
“Deptford Stories gave us a way to talk about the site and our ambitions in a meaningful and engaging way. Our plans for the site could easily be tracked back to this early work, and in turn back to the original site’s usage. It gave us helpful narrative through planning and equally it allowed us to start forming bridges into the local arts community.”
— Mark Dickinson, CEO of Anthology
Cultural life was seeded from the outset. This helped establish local connections, build awareness and create continuity between the site’s industrial past and its creative future. The existing community were part of the sales and marketing campaign, embedding them from the earliest stages in the project and ensuring local creativity remained an active part of the site’s future rather than simply a historical reference.
Ten years on — an ongoing success story
A decade later, Deptford Foundry provides a simple answer to the question every developer should ask: what legacy has been created?
The development was shortlisted for both the New London Awards and the Housing Design Awards, recognised for its placemaking and integration with the wider community. New routes, squares and courtyards helped reconnect a previously inaccessible industrial site, to not just remake the place but reframe its relationship to the wider city.
Its creative legacy has endured. As promised, the project delivered 30,000 square feet of affordable creative workspace, now home to 85 artist studios operated by Second Floor Studios & Arts. Fully occupied within a year of opening, they continue to support a thriving community of artists, makers and designers.
“To work in a purpose-built studio like Deptford Foundry has made it possible to make a living as a maker.”
— Janneke De Jong, Studio Janneke
Ten years later, the conversation is not about unit numbers, sales values or planning milestones — it is about creativity, community, heritage and identity. It’s about legacy. The FT described Deptford Foundry as a best practice example for other developers to follow: ‘Their success has catalysed the start of a new chapter that hopes to see more artist organisations and residential property developers working together.’
The developments that create the greatest long-term value are rarely those that begin with buildings. They are the ones that begin with understanding what makes a place worth caring about, and designing the conditions for that to thrive.
