Xintong Chen Yr 4

A Meanwhile Marsh School Breached! serves as a manifesto for an alternative marsh future at Beam Park, former site for a Ford Dagenham plant that sat on top of drained peatlands, to subvert the failing Thames Gateway plan for Beam Park to become one of the largest housing development in London.

The proposal is a Marsh School with constructed Meanwhile Marshes as an immediate solution to the lack of social infrastructure, part of later phases of Beam Park residential development that the scheme did not manage to deliver - and ultimately to reconnect the site back to its peatland origins through taking over with meanwhile interventions that gradually decay and breach into the surrounding landscape, leaving the Marsh School on top of a reclaimed permanent marsh landscape that accepts and co-lives with an inevitable flooding future.

The meanwhileness of the project lies within its intention as a community-oriented response to a politically, socially and environmentally entangled ‘Wicked Problem’ that its local government struggles to address. Through meanwhile approaches, the site will be rapidly taken
over by Meanwhile Marshes built by local residents, and soon followed by construction of the Marsh School as a political statement from the Dagenham communities to challenge and resist the failing Thames Gateway local plans.

The project believes in the potentials of collective construction to reimagine a new marshy Dagenham identity, and to shed light on accommodating non- human lives in the wider built environment. The Marsh School operates similar to a forest school and uses marsh materials such as mud, reed, alder timber and hedges that altogether weave a marshy building typology between the indoor and outdoor environments, between the reclaimed marshes and the Beam Park residents.

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