Continuation of my review of what Southwark LB had to offer in this year's Open House event (see here for Part 1) :-
6. William Booth College, SE5
Just over the road from Denmark Hill station, this seriously imposing, deliberately barrack-like set of buildings, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (Battersea Power Station and the classic red telephone box), serves as the Salvation Army's training school for 'officers' (ie the denomination's version of ministers or clergymen) . It is not, by some way, the most attractive of Scott's work. Its tower though - according to the officer who gave us the tour, slightly higher than the dome of St Pauls - offers a great panorama of London and a good vantage point to survey the new face of the City, Shard, Walkie Talkie and all.
7. ORTUS, Camberwell
This 2013 building by Duggan Morris Architects is bang on trend. With a vaguely Arne Jacobsen (St Catherine's College, Oxford) feel, it's all tasteful, nicely finished rectilinearity in exposed concrete, brick and glass. It is, therefore, desperately boring.
What does the building do, anyway? Not entirely sure: it is apparently a "pavilion housing learning and events facilities, cafe and exhibition spaces" according to the Open House guide. The promotional material attempts to elaborate with babble about providing a "totally immersive learning environment" via "interconnecting spaces to encourage intuitive learning activities". Hmm. Here's an idea. How about, folks, when you are writing this sort of thing you try saying something like "Local schools book out rooms in our building to put on lectures or rehearse plays." (if that is indeed the deal - who knows)? Or would that make it all too obvious? All in all, I didn't find this to be a terribly enlightening or inspiring visit.
8. Eco-home, Carmarthen Place, SE1
This house, tucked away in a quiet courtyard, was assembled in a matter of days from prefabricated wooden sections, bolted together. This ought to translate, one would imagine, into an appealingly techtile (my word for 'technologically intelligible', ie that winning sense of 'ooh-you-can-see-how-that-was-put-together') appearance, but somehow neither the interior nor the exterior really draw one's attention to the construction process. This is despite the minimalist finish: all of the interior walls are just the bare spruce of the prefabricated cassettes and the exterior finish is plain wood as well. The problem is that if you didn't know about the build method, you would assume that all the wood was mere cladding behind a standard concrete and steel frame or breeze block construction.
Inevitably the finish, particularly in the interior, is to a high standard, but it's all a little dull frankly. Here's a big plain wall of spruce; here is another big plain wall of spruce; and here's another big plain wall of spruce, but, look, it's curved this time. It has much less of the resourceful charm of the other domestic build, Asylum Road, that I saw earlier in the weekend (see Part 1). It's not that Asylum Road is less minimalist in style, or any more filled with stuff: both places are composed of undecorated planes of material. But Asylum Road's blank planes are so much more engaging because the tighter space-requirements and the architects' sensitive responses to those requirements, mean that the particularities of each pane of glass, each metal frame - their position, their dimensions - appear highly intelligible. There, everything is just right. Here, all the dimensions - of this or that wall, or banister, or window - whilst unimpeachably sensible, also appear, in their particularities, more or less arbitrary: nothing in their geometry asserts itself as having had to be designed that way. It's the aesthetic equivalent of the difference between a poised, tender touch and an indifferent shrug.
9. Brunel Museum (Thames Tunnel Shaft), Rotherhithe
The Thames Tunnel, between Rotherhithe on the south side, and Wapping, on the north, of the river, was the first tunnel ever to be constructed beneath a river. Built by Marc Brunel, assisted by his now more famous son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, its construction took 18 gruelling years between 1825 and 1843, nearly killing Isambard (and actually killing a number of workers) in one of several catastrophic floods. Why was it so difficult? Because the Brunels were basically tunnelling through sand and wet clay: very much like trying to dig a hole in the wet sand on the beach where it meets the sea. Worse in fact, because they were tunnelling all too near to the bottom of the Thames, hence the frequent flooding. Worse, moreover, because the Thames in those days was a huge foul sewer and hence completely toxic - several of the men working on the tunnel went blind from the 'river gas' vapours alone. Although the tunnel helped cement the reputations of the Brunels, was hailed as the Eighth Wonder of the World upon its completion and the techniques used in its construction paved the way for all subsequent successful soft-soil tunnelling operations (a mainstay of the London Underground network), somewhat tragically (given all the effort, expense and loss of life and limb) it was never profitable - largely because the finance necessary to enlarge the entrances to allow horse and carriage traffic to enter never materialised.
So soggy and insubstantial was the material that they were conjuring with that in order to create the shaft at Rotherhithe, rather than digging downwards, Marc Brunel built an enormous brick and steel drum (much like a gasometer) which was allowed to simply sink under its own weight, at a rate of a few inches a day, into the mud. This shaft was, for Open House, open to the public. One could descend about two thirds (I believe) of the original depth: the final third of the depth lies beneath a more recently installed floor, which covers the not-entirely-aptly named London 'Overground' tube line (formerly the East London Line and before that the East London Railway), the tube network having taken over the Thames Tunnel in 1865 making it the oldest piece of infrastructure in the London Underground system. It's a cold and eerie space, rumbling with echoes of the tube trains below. The place and the story behind it serves as a reminder of the majesty but also something of the terror of great 19th century engineering projects.
10. The Old Mortuary, Rotherhithe
Round the corner from the Brunel Museum is a community centre located in a late C19th mortuary. According to the lady giving the tour, Rotherhithe needed a mortuary because it was a major receiving point for corpses found washed up beside The Thames at that time, thanks in part to its policy of rewarding those who retrieved bodies from the river with the payment of a crown a corpse (Wapping paid only half a crown).
The building has been modified a fair bit since, but there were at least a few grim details to see, such as a big iron bar crossing the ceiling of one of the rooms used to hang bloated bodies up to drip-dry - or the fact that the community centre's kitchen was formerly a room into which putative kin of the deceased were led to identify the corpse, which they did through a opening giving onto the next room where the corpses were laid out (now the main events hall). It was somehow gratifying to stand in the latter room and be served tea through the same opening.
11. Sands Films, Rotherhithe
I almost didn't bother seeing this one as the write-up in the guide didn't appear all that thrilling ("Grade II listed riparian granary built with reclaimed timbers felled in 1700s. Converted in 1970s to picture library, film studios, prop and costume workshops ... "), plus the day was coming to an end and I assumed that the place would be closing soon. However, it turned out to be the most magical of all the places I visited during the weekend.
I hadn't heard of Sands Films before, but it transpires that they are thriving production company. They make sets, rent out studio space, but are above all known for making costumes for period dramas, eg the 2005 Pride and Prejudice, The Young Victoria and Wolf Hall.
The tour we were given was a fairly epic affair, incorporating a proper, 20 minute sit down lecture in the on-site cinema by Olivier Stockman, the company's Managing Director followed by talks by three other members of staff, at different locations around the complex. These included a seemingly impromtu mini-tour by Christine Edzard, a co-founder of the venture and an Oscar-nominated director in her own right. The best of the four speakers, in fact, was the last, the head of the costume department. Despite clothes being something I have zero interest in, she had me and the rest audience absolutely spell-bound (funny how you can sense this through the polite silence long before the applause) with a spiel that beautifully explained various aspects of the process of designing and putting together a costume, somehow managed to make telling points about the socio-political implications of the subtleties of Victorian dress conventions, whilst weaving in lovely nuggets about the wider film production (such as the fact that these days casting decisions are often made last minute - causing predictable headache to the costume-makers). She also managed to take our half-baked questions and spin out insightful, witty, richly (but wisely) opinionated answers. Although it was getting quite late, and many people there hadn't, I would guess, counted on the tour lasting as long as it did, she received the closest thing you can get to a standing ovation from people already standing.
The interior itself was rather delightful as well One imagines a studio as a featureless, strip-lighted hanger but Sands Films's premises is more like a Dickensian warren of low-ceiling rooms. One room will be kitted out with comfy furniture, antique knick-knacks, books and memorabilia, the next filled with sewing machines, ribbons and jars of neatly-labelled buttons, pins and beads. There seemed to be a whole floor of stored/used dresses, the racks delightfully by period (eg 1830s-40s). Ironically, the haphazard warren-of-rooms layout isn't, it seems, an original feature: according to Stockman, the original Georgian warehouse building was simply a brick shell for goods to be piled up in, with no floor even, let alone subdividing walls or floors, indeed, something rather closer to the studio 'hangar' of popular imagination.
For a long time Sands Films rented the rambling site, but soaring rents prompted them to fund-raise to buy the freehold in 2012. Lucky they acted when they did, because property prices in London have sky-rocketed since then, presumably meaning that they would otherwise have been forced to move to some anonymous building out in the suburbs by now.
Round the corner from the Brunel Museum is a community centre located in a late C19th mortuary. According to the lady giving the tour, Rotherhithe needed a mortuary because it was a major receiving point for corpses found washed up beside The Thames at that time, thanks in part to its policy of rewarding those who retrieved bodies from the river with the payment of a crown a corpse (Wapping paid only half a crown).
The building has been modified a fair bit since, but there were at least a few grim details to see, such as a big iron bar crossing the ceiling of one of the rooms used to hang bloated bodies up to drip-dry - or the fact that the community centre's kitchen was formerly a room into which putative kin of the deceased were led to identify the corpse, which they did through a opening giving onto the next room where the corpses were laid out (now the main events hall). It was somehow gratifying to stand in the latter room and be served tea through the same opening.
11. Sands Films, Rotherhithe
I almost didn't bother seeing this one as the write-up in the guide didn't appear all that thrilling ("Grade II listed riparian granary built with reclaimed timbers felled in 1700s. Converted in 1970s to picture library, film studios, prop and costume workshops ... "), plus the day was coming to an end and I assumed that the place would be closing soon. However, it turned out to be the most magical of all the places I visited during the weekend.
I hadn't heard of Sands Films before, but it transpires that they are thriving production company. They make sets, rent out studio space, but are above all known for making costumes for period dramas, eg the 2005 Pride and Prejudice, The Young Victoria and Wolf Hall.
The tour we were given was a fairly epic affair, incorporating a proper, 20 minute sit down lecture in the on-site cinema by Olivier Stockman, the company's Managing Director followed by talks by three other members of staff, at different locations around the complex. These included a seemingly impromtu mini-tour by Christine Edzard, a co-founder of the venture and an Oscar-nominated director in her own right. The best of the four speakers, in fact, was the last, the head of the costume department. Despite clothes being something I have zero interest in, she had me and the rest audience absolutely spell-bound (funny how you can sense this through the polite silence long before the applause) with a spiel that beautifully explained various aspects of the process of designing and putting together a costume, somehow managed to make telling points about the socio-political implications of the subtleties of Victorian dress conventions, whilst weaving in lovely nuggets about the wider film production (such as the fact that these days casting decisions are often made last minute - causing predictable headache to the costume-makers). She also managed to take our half-baked questions and spin out insightful, witty, richly (but wisely) opinionated answers. Although it was getting quite late, and many people there hadn't, I would guess, counted on the tour lasting as long as it did, she received the closest thing you can get to a standing ovation from people already standing.
The interior itself was rather delightful as well One imagines a studio as a featureless, strip-lighted hanger but Sands Films's premises is more like a Dickensian warren of low-ceiling rooms. One room will be kitted out with comfy furniture, antique knick-knacks, books and memorabilia, the next filled with sewing machines, ribbons and jars of neatly-labelled buttons, pins and beads. There seemed to be a whole floor of stored/used dresses, the racks delightfully by period (eg 1830s-40s). Ironically, the haphazard warren-of-rooms layout isn't, it seems, an original feature: according to Stockman, the original Georgian warehouse building was simply a brick shell for goods to be piled up in, with no floor even, let alone subdividing walls or floors, indeed, something rather closer to the studio 'hangar' of popular imagination.
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