Strawberry Vale is a housing estate built in the early 1970?s in North London, on the outskirts of East Finchley. There are 265 flats, maisonettes and houses together with community buildings, accommodating a high proportion of families and elderly people. When tenants voted to transfer from Local Authority landlords to a Housing Association, the estate became eligible for European funding, of which some £1.5 million is being spent on external improvements, chiefly to roads, parking, public and private boundaries and the public open spaces and circulation routes within the estate.

An extensive masterplanning and consultation exercise was carried out from September 1998 to May 1999 to identify the priorities for improvements with tenants, residents, landlords, police, youth workers, local councillors, businesses and schools. Plans were drawn up to show a complete restructuring of the traffic management, parking and vehicular access within the site, acknowledging the place of the car in our lives, yet prioritising and clearly defining the routes for pedestrians within a complex urban environment.