Portobello Promenade belongs to everyone. Dog walkers and wild swimmers, families and cyclists, regulars who have been coming here for decades. It is a place that works. What it has lacked, at its midpoint, is a place to stop.
Pipe Lane sits approximately halfway along the promenade, a natural pause in the coastal journey that has never been given the infrastructure it deserves. goodstrife identified that gap. And then did something about it.
Porty Prom Connections is a goodstrife community initiative established to give the promenade a focused creative and civic voice. Not a consultation body waiting for a brief from above. An originating force, identifying what this place needs, building the case for change, and leading the design thinking from the ground up.
The vision proposes a single-storey extension to the existing building housing a community café, flexible community space, and improved welfare facilities. Income generated is reinvested directly into the beachfront, upkeep, community initiatives, and a model of local economics that returns wealth to the place and the people it comes from.
A building that sits lightly on the promenade. Open, warm, and honest in its materials. That feels, from the moment you approach it, like it was always meant to be here.
It was. It just needed someone to begin.
To move the project forward and open the design process to the widest possible creative talent, goodstrife worked with Konishi Gaffney Architects to develop a community design competition through their Community Competitions platform, a vehicle specifically designed to make design competitions accessible, open, and genuinely community-led. The competition invited proposals for a new building, integrated landscape improvements, and a broader civic vision for the site: low-cost, low-carbon, and designed to deliver maximum community benefits through generous, forward-thinking design.
The winning design was submitted by Rob Miller of brown+company, a proposal that met the ambition of the brief with the lightness of touch the site deserves. His vision for Pipe Lane is the design foundation on which the next stage of the project will be built.
The renders that bring this vision to life were created by the talented team at Haze Viz, whose work captures not just what the building could look like, but how it could feel to be there.
Pipe Lane is the first step in a wider strategy for the whole promenade. The ambition does not stop here.