← Florentia Village← Florentia Village

What does a 21st-century community of makers look like? At Florentia Village in Harringay, the answer is a 100,000 sq ft extension designed to support small businesses, foster collaboration, and set a new benchmark for sustainable, community-led design.

Florentia has always been a place of industry and creativity. First established in the 1970s as a garment hub, it has grown into a thriving campus of over forty businesses in fashion, food, design, music, film and photography. The extension continues this story, creating new space for the next generation of makers while retaining the spirit of the locally loved village.

The scheme replaces a site of storage containers with a permanent, purposeful campus arranged around communal yards and raised walkways. Ground floor workshops provide double-height, robust industrial spaces, while smaller attic studios above offer bright, flexible rooms for start-ups and growing enterprises. This mix allows businesses to scale without leaving the community.

The extension to Florentia Clothing Village is designed to create community-driven, flexible, good value, high-quality workspace for local small businesses with secure occupational policies. The scheme is an evolution of our previous meanwhile projects, but adapted for permanent light industrial workspace. It applies similar modern methods of construction but takes it one step further; aiming for a long-life loose-fit approach that does the most with the least; the least funds, materials, resources and time.

Sustainability is embedded in every part of the scheme. Targeting BREEAM Excellent and net zero in use, the buildings maximise natural light, harness renewable energy, and use natural ventilation to reduce demand on resources. A bolted steel frame and repeated grid minimise waste and allow the buildings to be dismantled and reused at the end of their life.

Seeking to assemble robust materials elegantly, façades combine corrugated steel, green fibre cement panels and polycarbonate glazing with flashes of colour, while the interiors are self-finished in concrete, blockwork and plywood.

More than new workspace, the extension is an adaptable platform for makers to thrive, collaborate and grow — and a model for future industrial design.

“An incredibly unique project collaboration! Truly going to be the first proper purpose built home for creative making businesses in London.” Jacob Loftus, CEO of General Projects