Sourdough, Aviation and Classic Motorcycles

I'm writing this in a bakery.

The bakery is in Unit 68 of the Sandford Lane Industrial Estate in Kennington, just south of Oxford, tucked between a railway line and a field. It's called Proof Social Bakehouse, and it's a social enterprise that employs people in prison and prison leavers.

It's nine o'clock on a Friday morning. Around me there are families with toddlers, dog walkers, cyclists and a few people working on laptops. At weekends it's busier still.

Look at who else is here. A recording studio. An aviation company. Pharma engineering. A classic motorcycle dealer and a classic car specialist. A printer. Two garages. Engineers.

Not a chimney in sight.

Well. There is one, now I think about it. It's above the ovens behind me, and it smells of bread.

It Isn't a Showpiece

I should be honest about the place. It's tired - externally I mean. The tarmac has been patched more than once, the units have been here a long time, and nothing about it is going in anyone's brochure. It isn't the sort of place that usually gets treated as marketing material, unless somebody is planning a refurbishment.

And yet.

From where I'm sitting I can't see an empty unit. There are cars everywhere. Someone has put solar panels on one of the roofs. The bakery doesn't offer parking during the week, because the businesses here need the spaces.

Nobody ever produced a CGI of this estate. It has simply been quietly full for decades.

Drilling and Croissants

I can hear drilling from somewhere behind me. A compressor too. Someone is doing something noisy to a vehicle. Nobody in here seems to mind. They came for the coffee and the pastries, and they seem perfectly happy sitting in the middle of a working estate while it works. The radio in here is playing eighties hits. Some of the units look older than that.

A good number of them cycled in, along the river path from the city, or on one of the routes that follow a disused railway line.

That's a small piece of evidence for something developers spend chapters of a planning statement trying to prove. Active travel links, green routes, connections through to the next place along. Those sections attract a certain amount of eye-rolling, not least because they tend to be written for officers rather than for people. And yet here is a queue of people who have walked or cycled to an industrial estate on a weekday morning, because there's something here worth arriving at.

This is roughly what a lot of modern schemes are trying to engineer. Amenity space. Somewhere for staff to go. A reason to be on site that isn't purely functional. It costs real money to design in, and it's often the first thing to be value-engineered out.

Sandford Lane got there by accident, with one good tenant and a queue at the counter.

What Flexibility Actually Looks Like

Every industrial brochure I've ever read promises flexible accommodation suitable for a wide range of occupiers.

Sandford Lane is what that sentence looks like forty years later, after the market has had a proper go at it. Nobody planned for a sourdough bakery to end up next to an aviation business. The building didn't care. It had a roof, a door big enough, power and a yard, and the rest sorted itself out.

These units were built for one idea of what industry was, and they've been quietly reinterpreted ever since. At some point a landlord here said yes to a bakery, which can't have been an obvious decision at the time.

That's worth remembering when a scheme is designed around one named occupier, or marketed for a single use. The buildings that last are the ones that turn out to suit tenants nobody had thought of yet.

The Refurbishment Problem

This is where we do get involved with estates like this one, and it's a harder brief than it looks.

Refurbishment imagery has to do something new-build imagery never has to. It has to show what a place could become, while being honest about what it is now, and without quietly deleting the businesses currently working there. Show it too clean and nobody believes you. Show it as it stands and you haven't answered the question.

The useful version usually sits somewhere in between: the same estate, working better. The same yards, made clearer. The same buildings improved, without pretending the life already there has disappeared. Most of it happens in phases, around people who are still trading, which is a brief of its own.

Back to That Word

A couple of weeks ago I wrote something on LinkedIn about the word industrial, and how the picture it puts in a neighbour's head is chimneys and heavy plant.

If a planning notice went up on Sandford Lane tomorrow, that's roughly what people would imagine. Not a recording studio. Not aviation. Certainly not a bakery full of pushchairs on a Saturday morning.

The estate has been here for decades, proving the opposite every working day, and the word still hasn't caught up.

Maybe that's the missing piece. Not better images of the building being proposed, but better examples of places that already work. If what people fear is chimneys and heavy plant, showing them a bakery, a recording studio and an aviation business on an ordinary working estate might do more than another paragraph about flexible employment space.

I'm not sure what the better word is. But if you're trying to convince a community that a scheme can bring something useful to an area, a place like this may do more work than another aerial of an empty yard.

Until next week.

Rich

PS: If you do go, the pastries are the point. I've done the research on that too. (FYI They are a bit more expensive than your average, but so much more than average in terms of quality/taste/ingredients!)