Designing with landscape maintenance in mind

The HS2 project is delivering built infrastructure and natural environments on an unparalleled scale. The project affords a once in a generation opportunity to deliver nationally significant infrastructure that will respond to local landscape character and demonstrate an innovative and environmentally-sensitive design approach.

The project has been developed to minimise it’s impacts on the surrounding environment through high-quality design that is sensitive to landscape character, and where possible make a positive and contextual contribution by delivering environmental enhancements.

To achieve such success, it is important to consider the management and maintenance requirements early in the design process to create efficiencies in the whole life cycle of the scheme, and to enable delivery of landscape-led resilient low-maintenance systems which both enhance and create habitats. The management and maintenance of these landscapes will be key to the long-term success of the project to ensure the specific intent of each designed element is successfully safeguarded and delivered in line with the HS2 Design Vision.

This paper investigates the design parameters related to the operational maintenance of the railway and the associated landscapes and habitats by looking at best practice guidance and lessons learned from equally significant infrastructure schemes. Furthermore, it will explore how collaborative multidisciplinary design which puts landscape setting and context at the forefront of all design solutions will balance functional requirements, reduce embodied carbon, aid landscape and visual integration, maximise environmental and biodiversity gains, and deliver long-lasting landscape and ecological legacy.