Bring the Hammersmith Highline to life, and you could be in the money!
Looking for a little side hustle to help keep up with the cost of living in London? Look no further, because we’ve stumbled upon a way to make money whilst also making the city a prettier place to live, and all you need is a few crayons. Hammersmith BID, which was formed to help develop and improve Hammersmith, have launched a competition to design the new Hammersmith Highline – and the winning design will net you a nifty £5000.
Launched as part of the London Festival of Architecture, the competition is rather straightforward. You’re invited to reimagine a 200-metre stretch of disused railway in Hammersmith town centre, transforming it into a park in the style of New York’s famous Highline. (It’s a rather in-vogue concept, with similar projects in Camden, Shoreditch, and Peckham currently in various stages of development.)
Happily, there are two prizes up for grabs: one for interesting, deliverable designs, and curiously, one for “ideas without limits” – a category I suspect will be dominated by the precocious toddlers/snarky millennials demographic. Each prize is worth £5000, so if you can somehow win both categories, you’re in for a windfall.
Designs will need to blend the spectacular and the practical, drawing punters as an attraction whilst also remaining usable to local residents. Extra points will be awarded for those schemes which can elegantly navigate the Tube lines running alongside it, as well as meeting the London Festival of Architecture’s theme for 2019: “boundaries”.
I know I said crayons before, but you may need to bring your A-game to scoop the prize. The Hammersmith Highline competition will open on April 15th (though you can express interest beforehand), with a site visit on April 17th to show you exactly what you’re working with. It closes on May 31st, and by June 7th, you’ll find out if you’re London’s Next Top Park Designer.
Find out more, and register your interest, on the Hammersmith BID website.
Featured image: @lizlig