46, designer and co-founder of the Red or Dead fashion label, is now turning his hand to housing design, helping to develop an area of community-friendly affordable and sustainable housing in Dartford called The Bridge. The initiative is part of the wider Thames Gateway Project, in which between 200,000 and 400,000 new homes will be built on brownfield sites in Kent and Essex along a 65-kilometre stretch of land beside the River Thames

You studied geography at University College London. How did you get into fashion?
I met my wife Gerardine in Burnley [Lancashire], and she came to stay with me when I was at university. We ran out of money, so I had to sell my enormous second-hand clothes collection and all of the customised stuff I’d made when I was a punk in 1976 and ’77; Gerardine has always made her own clothes as well. We took it all to Camden Market on a Saturday and made £100, so we went back on the Sunday morning. Within a few weeks, we had 16 stalls and Red or Dead was becoming a brand. We sold Red or Dead in 1999 and set up Hemingway Design. Urban design is now the main thing that we do.

What exactly is The Bridge?
It’s the first truly mixed-use large-scale development that integrates business space, housing, public transport, schools, health, large-scale employment and retail. We’re designing the housing for the 107-hectare Bridge area. It’s like building a new town on a small scale where everything really flows. You don’t need to compartmentalise things as much as we’ve done in the past. The 1,134 houses will be affordable [one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments from £160,000, and two-, three- and four-bedroom houses from £225,000] and will take the pressure off London and the Southeast and give something different to Dartford, which has some pretty poor housing. It’s 17 minutes from central London but you can get a three-bedroom house for less than the cost of a one-bedroom flat in, say, Greenwich. It will be completed in 2012 or 2013, but people can start moving in during January next year.

In what way does The Bridge differ from other housing developments?
There are a lot more housing types, so when you go down the street, you can recognise your own house – it doesn’t feel like this huge, homogenous identikit Noddy box that a lot of developers build. That’s important – individuality is a big thing for people. The houses might all be from the same template – you’ve got to have maybe three or four [types] to keep costs down – but look individual thanks to clever use of colour and materials; my fashion background has been very useful for this. We’re aiming the development at a mixed demographic, because that’s life. In the city centres, a lot of housing developments
are very monocultural – lots of one- and two-bedroom apartments for old people – and it feels like a false society. The whole development uses a Sustainable Urban Drainage system, so all the rainwater is reused and the drainage ditches are at exactly the right angle for voles to build their homes. It’s been designed to make it easier to get to public transport than to get in your car and drive out. There are cycle lanes and secure storage, free [local] public transport if you live there with complete integrated transport systems built into the walls of every house to help journey planning – the first [such system] in Britain.

Your community designs are based on a Dutch architectural concept known as Woonerf. What is this?
Woonerf is the home-zone principle, which is about putting people first; there are no road markings, which means that people can walk freely. The theory is, if you make your streets feel like pavements, then drivers are so careful that they drive at very slow speeds because they don’t feel as if they have the right to drive fast. Take off the line markings and let bikes, people and cars mix on one surface – there are no pavements or kerbstones. From Holland up to Scandinavia, this is working really well. Traffic accidents and injuries are down where this system has been put in.

Will your houses still be here in 50 years?
I’m chairman of Building for Life, which is part of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). Recently, a CABE audit showed that 29 per cent of all housing developments built in the past five years shouldn’t have received planning permission because they’re so poorly conceived. It’s that 29 per cent that are going to be pulled down in 25 years. I’m a great believer in the idea that if you make a place less attractive to live in, it isn’t cherished and it ends up being regenerated in 30 years, like many developments built during the 1960s and ’70s. The carbon footprint of building, demolishing and then rebuilding after 30 years is huge. We should be building more beautiful places to live that will be loved as much as our Victorian streets, which are still up after 150 years.

What’s next?
Aside from overseeing the Staiths [an award-winning housing development in Tyneside] and Bridge  projects, we have a business called Land of Lost Content [the world’s largest archive of 20th- and 21st-century popular culture]; we have a range of sustainable water butts in the shape of a bottom; we’ve designed water bottles for Stop Climate Chaos to be handed out at Live Earth and Glastonbury to encourage people to fill up from standpipes instead of buying new plastic water bottles; and I also do a couple of lectures a year at the University of Wolverhampton and Northumbria University.

For more information, visit www.hemingwaydesign.co.uk and www.buildingforlife.org