Watkin Road is a distinctive residential tower that helps define the emerging Wembley skyline. Home to 229 apartments, the 24-storey building is articulated as a slender, tiered form in red and grey brick, framed by cream brick edges and lighter panels that emphasise its vertical rhythm. At street level, affordable workspaces open onto a sheltered colonnade, creating active frontage and a welcoming pedestrian route. Above, five landscaped terraces provide amenity, play and planting, giving vertical living a calm, neighbourly character.
We set out to transform a brownfield site into a vibrant, mixed-use destination combining housing, affordable workspace and public amenity. Brent’s Wembley Growth Area was rapidly intensifying, and the project offered the opportunity to shape both the skyline and the street. We sought a building with long-range presence and human scale, drawing inspiration from Giorgio Morandi’s still-life compositions to organise the tower as a series of vertically proportioned “fingers” that create depth, hierarchy and softness within a tall form.
Working closely with Barratt London, the brief was to maximise housing provision while delivering a liveable, walk-up quality supported by generous outdoor space. The development needed to contribute positively to its neighbourhood, offering active frontage, safe public routes and an engaging ground-floor environment. Collaboration with the GLA, Brent Council, the Design Council and local residents shaped the project from the outset, ensuring the final vision balanced density, character and community benefit.
The tower’s composition was developed as a broken-down arrangement of slender, vertically proportioned elements of subtly varying height and tone. This treatment softens the upper massing and focuses attention on the central, tallest element, while stepped volumes create terraces for play, planting and communal use. Durable brickwork grounds the building, and careful proportioning brings coherence across the façade. Landscaped podiums and upper-level terraces provide residents with generous outdoor spaces embedded within the building’s vertical form.
To activate the public realm, back-of-house functions were lifted to the first floor, allowing commercial and community-facing uses to animate the ground level. In collaboration with Macfarlanes Associates, a new colonnaded walkway was created, establishing a permeable pedestrian route between Fulton Road and North End Road. The result is a robust yet welcoming building that supports everyday life, strengthens Wembley’s evolving masterplan and forms a lively new community. Sales were buoyant, with all homes sold within two years of launch.
