The scheme, lodged with Brent Council earlier this month, would replace a 1990s Premier Inn hotel building and surrounding car park.

The new hotel would contain 212 rooms, while the neighbouring tower would house 605 student bedrooms. The rest of the site would be landscaped with new trees and improved pedestrian crossing points.

The scheme, for developer Whitbread, sits opposite Wembley Park station and is intended to fit within the wider Wembley Park Masterplan. It aims to ‘complete an emerging ensemble of buildings that frame the arrival square’ leading to Wembley Way and the stadium to the south of the site.

The two towers are separated by a two-storey pavilion, providing amenities for each building, while the site perimeter is left open for wide pavements and landscaped features.

Sheppard Robson said the two buildings ‘share a common architectural language’ but differ in their colour, with the student tower being a lighter shade with a façade of horizontal lines accentuated to provide shading.

In contrast, the hotel features a darker palette of ‘‘earth tones’ and has been designed with vertical proportions. Both towers use a precast concrete cladding system selected to reduce embodied carbon.

Model of submitted Sheppard Robson Wembley Park Drive scheme

Source: Sheppard Robson

Sheppard Robson partner Dan Burr said: ‘Wembley Park Drive brings together a number of the practice’s specialisms in one place – our hotel and PBSA expertise, sustainability team and model-makers all working to inform the design process in different ways and contributing to the dialogue with external stakeholders.

‘The project knits two uses on to a constrained site’

‘The resulting proposal has been developed to work at multiple scales: the urban scale via the skyline silhouette; the neighbourhood scale through the two complementary forms; and the human scale of the carefully designed street edges and extensive greening.

‘[The] project knits the two uses on to a constrained site while exploiting the synergies between them. We hope our proposal will contribute to Wembley as both a place to live and a major leisure destination.’

The design also considers overheating, including mechanical cooling systems alongside a ‘passive design strategy’ for natural ventilation in order to meet the Greater London Authority’s energy and carbon standards.