Surrey Docks Farm was featured as a Building Study in the Architects' Journal.
The architects’ ambition to ‘think strategically’ and plug the farm back into the city is achieved notwithstanding the modest scale of the new interventions. ‘We suggested tweaks through small changes,’ Molloy explains. Very little has been demolished. Instead, the existing three-storey ‘tower’ and adjoining pitched outbuilding, now the River Room, which were damaged by fire over a decade ago, have been stripped back and rehabilitated in a utilitarian palette of timber floors and window frames, built-in furniture, and exposed trusses and ceiling joists. ‘We didn’t want to sanitise what was there,’ recalls Pup Architects’ other co-founder, Chloë Leen. ‘It was important it wasn’t too slick.’
Keeping the existing fabric was not a matter of historical conservation, but of necessity. The buildings, constructed roughly of breeze blocks in the ’90s, were ‘not precious’, as Molloy points out. But the fire-damaged buildings sat on a plot designated by Southwark Council as Borough Open Land and a previous planning application proposing to demolish them and build anew was rejected several years ago.
The materials used in the makeover are inexpensive and simply treated, in line with the modest £860,000 budget, but there is artfulness and pleasure in their detailing. The new toilet block, adjoining the forge, is a raw timber frame, echoing the exposed eaves and joists of the Segal-inspired building nearby. It is partially clad in translucent polycarbonate, a reference to industrial agriculture. The black, rough-sawn timber boards which dress the River Room and the tower are expressed in bands that blithely disregard the placement of the floors within, the rhythm of the boards drifting further apart as the façades ascend, stretching into a slow march at the top of the tower.