Hackney rises: new meets old—materials and functions combine to complete a dense cluster of live/work spaces in north-east London

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 2003

The edge of Hackney against Islington is one of the most rapidly changing areas in London. As in every other nineteenth-century city, industrial uses, which predominated until two decades ago, are rapidly becoming very unusual. Their sites and buildings are being occupied by service trades, the professions and leisure activities. A complex form of gentrification is taking place, but many of the original inhabitants are still there in ageing social housing that is sometimes being renovated. Planners tend to be comparatively relaxed about new uses and new building so the area has become increasingly popular with architects.

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In 2001, Trevor Horne was asked by Victoria Miro to convert an old warehouse into a gallery, which he did excellently by stripping it of excessive structure and divisions and creating serene spaces that allow artworks to speak while having presence themselves. As he was working on the project, Horne became aware that a neighbouring site was available, and with three artists, he managed to buy it. After an extremely complicated process of acquiring planning permission and development funds, Horne and his friends have created a model of mixed-use inner-city redevelopment.

On the site were three buildings. To the west was a fine early nineteenth-century brickwork factory building with iron windows, curiously one of the few fragments remaining from the first wave of urbanization of the area. In the middle was a rather nondescript house, very run down. And at the other end of the little row was a two-storey 1930s industrial building, brick with steel windows. Because of the rarity of the early 1800s corner building, the planners wanted the exterior at least to be preserved. Internally, the building was full of timber columns, because it was owned by the royal bedmakers, and the British royal family likes its beds solid and massy. Horne removed the wooden columns and stiffened the existing structure with steel where necessary to provide unimpeded studio spaces on three floors.

Neither the house nor the '30s building were to be conserved, and Horne demolished the whole of the middle building, while retaining the ground floor of the eastern one, again to be a studio space. He retained the middle of the site for himself and developed it by creating a dramatic top-lit common staircase in black terrazzo between bag-rubbed brick walls. This serves the studios created out of the bed factory, Horne's office on the first floor of the new middle element, and his flat on the top floor. The move allows the studio, office and domestic spaces to be simple and calm, free of internal vertical circulation.

Planners demanded that Horne should balance the mass of the old bed factory with a similar one built up from the '30s building. In the middle, he was allowed to do much as he liked, so he made a ground floor of blue engineering brick, which contains a little gallery (though it could become another studio). Above is a glass strip window to light the first floor office space, and above that is zinc cladding to show that function.

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New brickwork (both blue in the middle and reddish in the new mass to the east) properly follows the English bond of the original work (alternate rows of headers and stretchers). It is a welcome and thoughtful reprieve from endless stretcher bond, used in almost all other new buildings in the area.

Horne's office on the first floor is calm, simple, high and light; part is rented to a graphic design company. On top, daylight is brought into the heart of Horne's flat by a central court into which you emerge out of a little corridor leading from the top stair landing. You turn to see the main living space at the end of the court; to the left are small bedrooms; to the right is the studio of the architect's wife, a photographer and video artist. Luminance pervades the living space. From outside, it seems to be unnecessarily picturesque to give the mass the planners had required to balance that of the bed factory, a brick gable fronting a pitched roof covered in industrial corrugated cladding. But inside, all is clear. The pitched roof gives height, so the main bedroom can be slung over the kitchen, while the sitting area becomes a double-height space. Wonderful views are to be had from the kitchen balcony, a broad and generous platform overlooking, in the foreground, the end of a forgotten canal that forms a rustic pool outside the Victoria Miro Gallery, then over the roofs of the local warehouses to the skyline of the City. Similar vistas open over the horrid McDonald's across the road through the two tall windows in the gable: there is a bit of Hawksmoor's St Lukes, the towers of the Barbican and London's tallest building, the recently re-branded Tower 42.

This ability to snatch unexpected advantages from what initially seems a most unpromising site is characteristic of Horne's whole approach. If the rest of the area could be redeveloped with similar ingenuity. Hackney will become one of London's most fascinating areas. P. D.