Cities are not made by housing alone. Nor, even, by the cafes and retail units and light garnish of landscape that tend to come with speculative residential developments. They also need places such as Cockpit Arts, a social enterprise providing studio space to craftspeople that has been operating in Bloomsbury, central London, since 1986, and in Deptford, in the south-east of the city, since 2002. Cities are made, inter alia, by people making things.
Their second location is in one of those zones where the pressure to build housing numbers combines with the availability of ex-industrial sites to create a newish but already widespread urban type. There’s housing – close-packed, repetitious and rectangular – built with remorseless spatial efficiency, the mentality of a distribution warehouse applied to places to live. And there’s what’s left in the gaps between the housing: weeds, mud, oddities, broken things, fragments of bygone engineering and public works, survivors of older and richer versions of city life.
So the ubiquitous confronts the distinctive, Cockpit Arts being very much on the side of the latter. Across its two sites it provides working space for 182 craftspeople – weavers, jewellery makers, leatherworkers, woodworkers, printers, a maker of bows for stringed musical instruments. It creates communities in which well-established names such as Eleanor Lakelin, who sculpts wooden objects from trees felled due to decay, work alongside young makers just starting up. Cockpit Arts works to incubate their businesses, to create opportunities for talent from disadvantaged backgrounds, to make their output visible, and to bring surrounding communities into their world, through education programmes and exhibitions.
Its four-storey building, built to house council offices in the 1960s, later the headquarters of a charity, is a basic and skinny concrete-framed construction, with a few touches of hardwood joinery that speak of some kind of civic pride. It has a brick wall in front that used to carry a much-loved 1989 mural, Love Over Gold, named after the 1982 Dire Straits album, which was named after a piece of graffiti on the same wall, in front of which the band once performed.
Now the architects Cooke Fawcett have made the building over and added to it, both to create more work space and provide a cafe and education and community rooms through which the studios can connect better with the general public. The total project cost is £3.24m, of which £2.3m has been provided by mayor of London Sadiq Khan’s Good Growth Fund, which aims to nurture community development. It is, among other things, a statement of faith in the future importance of keeping a place like this in London, where artists’ studios are vulnerable to rising rents, on the sort of site that could easily have been obliterated by a residential tower.
Oliver Cooke and Francis Fawcett, ex-employees of Herzog & de Meuron, previously designed deft additions to Bold Tendencies, the successful arts centre formed on top of a multistorey car park in nearby Peckham. There they added a rooftop viewing platform and an acoustic wall that made a parking deck into a concert venue – low-cost interventions that add extra dimensions to the experience of the existing structure. At Cockpit Arts they similarly seek to get the best out of what’s there already, to raise it with subtle moves, to hold back from imposing their own design signatures. Their reticence is partly a matter of cost, an already tight budget having been hit by inflation in construction prices, but it’s a strength of the architects’ approach that it can adapt to such challenges.
Others were invited to contribute. The first thing you see is Head, Heart, Hands, a new artwork on the old front wall, made of softly coloured triangular tiles by Amber Khokhar, a maker based in Cockpit Arts, whose other works include a carpet commissioned by King Charles for Buckingham Palace. Created in collaboration with local children and community groups, the mural is inscribed with line drawings and texts that allude to the history of the area, to the many languages spoken there, and to the journeys that people take through it. It replaces the damaged Love Over Gold, with the consent of the latter’s artist, Gary Drostle, and aims, in Khokhar’s words, to develop the latter’s theme of “the superiority of human kindness over material wealth”. There are also plans to create a version of the original elsewhere in Deptford.
A new opening in the formerly impenetrable wall takes you into a “craft garden” by the designers of furniture and landscape Sebastian Cox and Imogen McAndrew, planted with such things as willow, flax and madder, which are used to make fabrics and dyes. Next the public can enter the building by way of its cafe, which is a case of stripping back the structure, reviving its hardwood floors, and enjoying the transparency that comes from glass walls on either side.
Beyond that is a yard with a new studio building, an assembly of timber beams, reddish corrugated aluminium and pink concrete blocks formed around the practical demands of working with stone and wood, its eaves overhanging so as to shelter work outside. It wears its making on its sleeve. You can see what every joint and bracket is doing, but it achieves a certain intricacy and range of scales from these simple means.
Taken as a whole, the Deptford Cockpit Arts is a loose array of spaces, inside and out, that allow improvisation and temporary appropriation by the craftspeople who occupy it. There are works in progress scattered about, pieces of stone on their way to becoming something, promising logs. The architecture of Cooke Fawcett helps to nudge these places along, to make them into better versions of themselves.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the complex’s back wall, another residential development is about to go up, called Sun Wharf, rising up to 19 storeys. As it happens, both it and the Cockpit Arts expansion grow from policies of the mayor of London. The studios have their support from the Good Growth Fund; the quantity of housing is encouraged by the fact that this part of Deptford is an “Opportunity Area”, a designation designed to maximise development, of which the cluster of skyscrapers around Vauxhall and Battersea Power Station are the best known outcomes. There’s a crude wisdom here, given that a city needs both homes and creative work. The two don’t go together very comfortably, but both are at least there.
