Gillett Square Community Asset

‘Alsoness is a place where the least likely things may happen, where extra-curricular activities are shared and collaborations celebrated; this is where Hawkins/Brown engage in Andness.” So says an online brochure for the architects who have just completed the Dalston Culture House in east London. This might sound a little pretentious, but what the architects are saying, in the way architects will, is that they like to work in areas of design and of cities where they are able to add something extra and even unexpected to the brief. And to work with all sorts of people who might send them off on an unexpected course.

Certainly, the Dalston Culture House would have been an unexpected building even just five years ago. For this inner Victorian suburb had become, over decades of neglect, decidedly down-at-heel, hardly the sort of place smart gallery- and concert-goers would expect to go to find the best in new art or music.

What Dalston has never been, though, is dull. Over the past 25 years it has become home to an “alsoness” of some of the best Turkish restaurants this side of Istanbul, an “andness” of increasingly exotic foodstalls along Ridley Road market (fish heads, dried prawns, cassava, yams, tiger nuts), as many Africans coming to live here today as West Indians did yesterday, waves of creative young things looking for low rents and reasonable mortgages. People, in fact, from just about every class, creed and colour in the world. It has also witnessed a sparky new arts culture emerging from its streets.

The Culture House is not a great work of architecture, but is an important one. Likable, too. Built on the west side of Dalston’s Gillett Street car park, where Hawkins/ Brown recently built a row of smart new market stalls, it marks the first stage of the development of Gillett Square, one of the 100 new squares for London promoted by the Mayor of London’s Architectureand Urbanism Unit, headed by Richard Rogers and Ricky Burdett. Their aim is to replicate, in one form or another, the hugely successful plan that has seen one Barcelona square after the other, from the smallest and poorest to the richest and grandest, cured, transformed and upgraded by just the right doses of architectural, planning and cultural medicine.

In the Catalan capital, this popular policy has been realised over a period of decades, and is far from complete. London’s inner suburbs are an equally daunting challenge but they can be changed for the better in much the same way: if an area benefits from just one positive transformation, like the Dalston Culture House and the new Gillett Square, it can spark regeneration at all levels, without recourse to “comprehensive redevelopment” schemes.

Dalston was once considered to be one of the handsomest suburbs in London, at least in the early 1860s when terraced houses for a new generation of season-ticket-holding clerks and artisans spread along its new railway and tramway induced streets. The Hawkins/Brown project is a small – £975,000 – if equally handsome step in the right direction.

The four-storey, steel-framed cultural centre now houses the Vortex jazz club, removed here from Stoke Newington, as well as a cafe, shop, gallery and artists’ studios. The building also frames an outdoor performance space. The driving force behind the project is the Dalston Culture House Partnership, comprising Hackney Co-operative Developments, the New Vortex Jazz Club and the Vortex Jazz Foundations. Patrons include Rolling Stones drummer and Vortex veteran Charlie Watts. The aim is to attract stars, while nurturing local talent.

The jazz club is the heart of the building and occupies ground and first floors. Its presence is signalled by a colourful bay projecting from the otherwise straight up-and-down main block of the building. This bay, or “drawer” as the architects like to call it, slides out into and above Gillett Square. Clad in translucent polycarbonate, the walls of this “drawer” – which, sadly, doesn’t slide open (that would have been way beyond the budget) – are backlit by fluorescent battens, the colours of which can be changed to suit the mood of the music of the day. Or night. So, the Culture House, although a straightforward building in most respects, will appear to have many moods. The backlighting also lights one side of the square and cars parked below, so no street lamps are needed here, a neat way of reducing the pavement clutter known as “street furniture”.

What is particularly right about this building is its lack of pretension; it is a working tool rather than the kind of showy icon much in demand by national and local governments today which would have been in danger of going out of fashion within a couple of years. Instead, the Culture House feels almost as elegantly anonymous as a simple Georgian house converted into a club or restaurant decades ago in Soho might be, the sort that boasts neon signs in flashing reds and greens and blues.

Hawkins/Brown have created a building that ought to be able to serve a variety of different users. This matters in an area where there is no guarantee that the businesses and places of entertainment that serve it and, indeed, the people who live there will remain static.

Hawkins/Brown have shown themselves to be quiet masters of any number of unfashionable projects in some of the poorest parts of Britain. Over the past 17 years, the practice has made its reputation with low-key yet elegant designs, such as a number of play centres for children in the London Borough of Newham, and the refurbishment of Dagenham Civic Centre and Barking Town Hall. They have also designed the handsome Sheep Field Barn Gallery for the Henry Moore Foundation, and faced up to the imposing challenge of updating the lumpen 1960s Euston Tower, all 408ft of it.

Hawkins/Brown have a knack of getting something just that little bit special from what, in lesser hands, might be rather dull city projects. What they appear to understand is that a city, particularly one as big as London, needs just a few showpieces but very many modest buildings that promise long, useful lives.

The Dalston Culture House shows how messy and grimy plots in the poorest parts of inner-city suburbs can produce something special, without the architecture having to shout to gain our attention.