Elderslie Street Restoration, Winton Queensland
Elderslie Street is the heart of Winton, an award-winning restored community space with historic installations shaped by RPS’ team of landscape architects.
Challenge
Winton’s main shopping centre runs through Elderslie Street, the multifunctional space that also hosts many local events. With a tourism boom seeing crowds of more than 4,000 visiting the town for popular events, and movie makers lining up to use the town centre as a scenic backdrop in feature films, Winton Shire Council made plans to restore Elderslie Street.
Our landscape architects were engaged to develop a design scheme for this wide street featuring versatile and sustainable features that retained and enhanced the town’s authentic outback character.
Solution
Teaming up with local environmental scientist and industrial public space installation specialist Street and Garden, RPS landscape architects have breathed new life into Elderslie Street. The completed restoration project turned the wide street into a multi-use space capable of accommodating both locals and visitors.
Key features of the project included:
- Early use of 3D modelling and flythroughs that allowed Winton Shire Council to directly engage with the community and demonstrate how they would experience the new streetscape.
- Collaboration between the local community and design team to keep the authenticity of the streetscape.
- Research into the town’s unique environmental and soil conditions, and the selection of local natives to guarantee long term plant survival.
- Locally sourced materials and labour to minimise the requirement and cost of sourcing and transporting to the remote regional location.
- Visual installations and interpretive signage that provide self-guided tours and engage visitors through storytelling.
- The refurbishment or relocation of existing street monuments and artworks and integration of them back into the new-look streetscape.
- Shaded green areas that provide areas for crowds to socialise and take shelter from the heat, particularly during local events.
- Dinosaur footprints that educate both locals and visitors about the dinosaurs that once roamed the area and provide a link to the town’s famous dinosaur stampede conservation park.
Design award for Elderslie Street
Image credit: Florian Groehn Photography
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Working across urban, rural, and coastal landscapes, our landscape architecture specialists help clients to showcase the unique character, climate and culture of the communities they design for.
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