Words:
Carl Turner
Photography:
Ståle Erickson
Like many small practices, our studio has followed cheap space around central London for the last ten years or so. We started in a King’s Cross railway arch above an antique dealer, moved to an empty factory awaiting demolition in Archway, before moving south to lliffe Yard at Elephant and Castle: a mews of Victorian workshops built by Peabody where designers were pushing out artists as rent crept up. Then it was Bermondsey Street to a former button factory (redeveloped by a canny gallery owner), a shared space in an old workshop off Columbia Road in East End, onto a converted chapel in Hackney, to our own studio in Brixton, build on brownfield land, and finally to Regent Studios Unit 61 (on photographs).
This constant change and struggle for every inch of usable space characterises an ‘urban’ condition. London, above other UK cities, is perhaps reaching a condition similar to that of Tokyo, where the land itself (and not the buildings) is the real asset.
As a practice we are also very interested in the spaces between buildings. The markets of London’s East End are a constant reference in the way we think about cross-programmed space, based around events and time. This is the lifeblood of cities.
Most of the work we made shows how the practice has worked with urban scraps, often literally carving out space from the narrowest gaps in what many would consider undesirable parts of town.
