Greenland has again hosted a day of fully-booked tours at its award-winning Ram Quarter development in southwest London.
Visitors met in the development's picturesque Bubbling Well Square and were greeted by a representative of the developer Greenland which built and owns the site. EPR Architects, which designed the site's mixed-use residential and commercial masterplan, led the first part of each tour, a walk up the central Boulevard and back down the development's pleasant riverwalk. The architect introduced the various stages of development, including consultation and planning with the local authorities; construction, and the thinking behind the colours and materials used in the bricks and roofing; how to best to preserve the site's heritage, history and listed buildings; and how to become a new hub for residents, businesses, events and activities in the local community and beyond.
After completing a circuit of the development, the groups were taken into the site's Heritage Centre, where artefacts from the site's history were presented, and the story of brewing was recounted. Ram Quarter is the UK's oldest continuously-operating brewery, with brewing documented to have taken place on the site since at least 1533 (but almost certainly earlier), and was for the last two centuries the headquarters of renowned UK brewer Young's. The Heritage Centre tours were led by the Heritage Centre manager, who had been a brewer with Young's and is now a brewer with Ram Quarter's on-site microbrewery Sambrook's, London's oldest independent brewer which now makes its home at Ram Quarter.
The tours ended with visitors being offered a free pint of beer in the Sambrook's taproom. The visitors had glowing comments to make about the tours, and Ram Quarter looks forward to offering new visitors the opportunity to tour the site at suitable occasions next year.
To mark its inclusion again this year in the Open House festival, Greenland ran a photography competition encouraging visitors to the site to take their own images of the site's design and architecture. The competition is now closed, and EPR Architects is judging the winner which will be announced in the coming days.