A community space dedicated to art and well-being.

Trowbridge Centre used to be a social service, it has now been transformed into a creative work place, offering a range or artists studios and offices, a café, a fitness club, gardens, and a gallery all within one space in East London. Our main aim is to create a vibrant community garden to support gregarious activities in a safe environment, offering shared allotments, gardens and other facilities, open for the young and the elderly to meet, talk and create together. The main benefactors are the local community, both young and older generations, of all and any background.

We were engaged to provide design services to plan the conversion of the building to studios - imagining how the central cafe, gallery and cafe space would provide a meeting and gathering space for studio tenants and visitors to the cafe and fitness space.

We were later invited to design and oversee the delivery of the north yard entrance. The design created valuable external space for outdoor work, seating, planting and of course unloading and bins!

To improve the legibility and access of the north entrance, we installed new glazed doors directly into the gallery - and provided clear way-finding.

The site had been inaccessible and prone to flooding due to a lack of drainage. Our landscape proposal used a very modest budget to create an accessible new covering of compacted gravel, tarmac, railway sleeper timber and bark chippings - along with a new drainage system.