Whaleback’s Director Richard Dollamore wrote a development review for Placemaking Resource about the Bayside redevelopment site in Worthing. The following text is an extract from that review.

Developed by Roffey Homes and designed by Allies & Morrison, Bayside replaces the Aquarena Swimming Baths in Worthing. Completed in 2021, it won the RIBA South East Award and Royal Fine Art Commission Building Beauty Award in 2023. The scheme is made up of a U-shaped block of four to six storeys, its enclosed courtyard opening to East Beach, with a detached, fifteen-storey tower acting as punctuation to its south and a café pavilion on the beachfront. It contains 141 one, two and three bed apartments, with 42 (30%) of these being affordable (an approximately equal mix of social rent and shared ownership), 641sqm of commercial space.

The 1968 swimming baths building had lost its youthful good looks but was by architects Attenborough & Jones, who were part of the team that designed the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room and Hayward Gallery complex for the South Bank. Design quality and innovation are part of the site’s heritage and there is a satisfying correspondence between the confident proportions of the baths and Allies & Morrison’s effortless manipulation of form and detail.

The development describes a compact urban block, responding to the grid established by the streets to north and east, with Beach House Park to its west. Bayside is separated from the park (historically the gardens of the Regency Beach House) by the Splashpoint Leisure Centre, which was designed by WilkinsonEyre and completed in 2013. This neighbour has a less disciplined relationship to the urban form and, being set back behind a vehicle drop-off and parking area, struggles to assert itself positively on the street scene. Bayside works for both sites in enclosing the east side of the Splashpoint forecourt, but the space is still leaky and it might be better if the drop-off area could be redeveloped to enclose the street.

The north side of Bayside is good, disciplined, and well-detailed architecture, the hallmark of Allies & Morrison, which is of four visible storeys, rising to five at the Splashpoint corner. Unlike the internal courtyard elevations, which are cream-coloured, the walls are a mix of buff and brown brick. Perhaps a nod to the mixed materials of the Brighton Road, this seems too accommodating and it might have been bolder to stick with the single cream brick colour. It has a wide pavement with small trees in planters, giving a sense that the road is very wide, and larger street trees would be more effective in moderating this.

The east side of the block is also polite, rising from two to six storeys without overwhelming the two-storey terraced houses of the adjacent Merton Terrrace. Whilst understandable, the neighbouring houses are unlisted and might be considered a future opportunity for redevelopment at higher density. A long-term masterplan for the towns densification could avoid some of the inefficiencies and contortions that result from the requirements to respond to impermanent site conditions.

On the beach side, Bayside responds less to its mixed context but instead defines a single, purer design language that is unique to this site whilst also evoking Worthing’s Art Deco heritage, as well as the colours and curves of its Regency buildings, but without any sense of stylistic reproduction. The public space east of the tower is occupied by Perch Pizza, giving this enjoyable space a clear public use and a reason to stick around. Views into the swimming pool and reading room in the ground floor of the tower communicate that it is designed as a place to live, be enjoyed and to get to know your neighbours.  

Bayside is an undoubted success and a huge achievement for those involved, not least the Council’s forward-looking regeneration team. It is an excellent example of a type of redevelopment of which there is enormous additional potential within Worthing and along the south coast. The principal risk appears to be that other developments could seek to achieve comparable scale without equal design sensitivity or refinement. Whilst taller than its neighbours, it does not appear too big and its careful articulation of details always maintains a human scale.