The Lee Valley is not the most attractive part of London, but it does possess a curious, post-industrial authenticity. Here sits a gleaming aluminium beast: the enclosure to hi-tech pumping machinery that deals with some of London’s prodigious waste: a large industrial barn, some 57m long, 29m wide and 23m. high — a gleaming enclosure to sophisticated pumping machinery, the fifth of a series of sewage pumping stations built here since 1869. Four sewers are brought together into one large concrete culvert that forms the base of the entire building. Using 16 submersible pumps, the sewage is pumped up 13m and discharged into the upper level culvert, and from there into the 1869 main outfall sewer and the treatment plant at Barking (in the same manner it has been done since that time). Four diesel generators — sitting in the middle of the building — power the whole affair whilst a central gantry and two side-aisle travelling cranes are for lifting the submersible pumps and I other machinery for maintenance. The enclosing superstructure comprises lightweight steel ‘A’frames, bearing internally upon a rectilinear frame that I carries travelling cranes necessary for maintaining the interior machinery. It is this structure that is at the heart of the design and becomes the key to the expression of the gable ends.
Inevitably, one can’t but enjoy I comparisons with London’s original ‘barn’: St. Paul’s in Covent Garden (right; InigoJones, 1633), John Outram’s pumping station on the Isle of Dogs (another shed elevated into architecture; Stewart Street; 1988) and the Richard Rogers pumping station at the Royal Victoria Dock (bottom right; 1987).
89 This timber-framed and clad SureStart school and community centre (Abbey Children’s Centre; North Street, Barking IG11, designed by Cazenove Architects, 2005; rail — Barking) offers a welcome architectural relief in an otherwise bland suburban area. The building form wraps itself around the perimeter of the site, thus providing enclosure to an inner playground. However, things go awry when the architects tell us that, “Its identity is underscored by timber framing that strives to make references to a tradition of fishing boats for which Barking was once famous”!
лі Another project at central Barking,
91 adjacent to the Town Hall, is Tim Foster’s refurbishment of a 1936 theatre, which provides a new multi-purpose auditorium as well as a foyer extension, rehearsal and teaching spaces for the Performing Arts Department of Barking College (The Broadway; 2004). The architects tell us that ‘the glazed fagade reveals the activity within and welcomes the community inside’. Certainly, the refurbishment is a welcome change. (Compare with Stratford Centre.)
Technically, there’s not a lot to say about this pedestrian bridge for Plashet School in Newnham: an artfully propped, prefabricated, 67m, blue painted steel construction, covered with tensed fabric, linking two halves of a girls’ school across a busy road, (one from the 1930’s, the other an eight storey 1960’s building).
But it’s where utilitarianism ends and the enjoyment of designing a contrived artifice begins that this simple link bridge elevates itself into the alchemy that transforms the mundane into the valuable. It’s a joy to see, to pass under, to walk through, giving the anonymous school buildings a new identity. The sinuous curve (argued as necessary to preserve an existing tree, but they would say that wouldn’t they?) is interrupted by an intermediate hang-out with steel benches.
It’s cheerful, inventive and — in the details that incorporate lighting and get rid of rainwater — distinctly quirky. You’ll either rank this, together with Alsop’s Peckham Library, as two of the best pieces of London’s contemporary architecture — or dismiss it as over-wrought mannerism posing as instrumentalism. We hope you’ll join with us in seeing this as the celebratory act that is good design: entirely rooted in its substance, in contingent factors and it is and does. This is architecture at its simplest and most sophisticated: on target; both appropriate and authentic (two words that are difficult to employ these days).
Doesn’t it have problems? Well, of course: in particular, the magazines never show you the most difficult and unresolvable part of the equation: the ends where the new bridge hits the two schools. And it’s smaller than you think. And the fabric gets dirty. However, few designs can induce the feeling that such criticism is carping.
q л At the time of writing AHMM has two large, twin 92 blocks being constructed in front of the old interwar years Town Hall at Barking (Clockhouse Avenue, Barking IG11; Rail: Barking. This strident, ‘U’-shaped plan will accommodate a library (now a ‘life long learning centre’) and 206 one and two bedroom flats. The building — about as strident as designs get in such a context — should be complete by mid-2006 and will include a ‘new civic square’. The adjacent Town Hall is a 1936 design (built 1954 – 8).