If you’ve ever travelled through Shoreditch on the top of a double-decker bus you may have wondered why there are a couple of old tube carriages perched incongruously on top of a disused viaduct.
These aren’t the result of a particularly violent cyclone, they are work spaces that form part of a charity project, Village Underground.
Village Underground’s remit is to provide low-cost studio space to fledgling businesses, and currently architects, film-makers and producers, photographers, jewellery makers, artists and designers, are all climbing aboard.
The inspiration to use redundant tube trains as work space for hard up creative types came not from an urban planner or architect, but from furniture designer and project director, Auro Foxcroft.
Foxcroft dreamt up the idea while travelling by train in Switzerland, and, unlike most of us, who would have left our ideas at the dream stage, he phoned London Underground as soon as he got back.
As it happened, they had a few carriages that were heading for the scrap yard, and a deal for a nominal amount of £100 was struck.
"The idea came from my own experience as a designer trying to start a small practice with friends – we just couldn’t get a foot on the ladder because of the price of studio and workspace… so I designed my own," says Foxcroft.
Julie Pottier, from Tube Lines, the company responsible for disposing of the obsolete Jubilee Line carriages, is happy to see them recycled:
"It’s great that we can put these old carriages to good use, benefiting local people and saving the environment a little.
"We’re keen to find more ways of avoiding waste so if other people or organisations have ideas, we’d love to hear from them."
Although the carriages were cheap, negotiating the planning permission minefield, and organizing the physical removal, which required huge cranes, took a lot of Foxcroft’s time and cost him around £25,000.
But, once the seats and the mass of wiring was ripped out, and floors replaced, they made surprisingly good studios, with desks by the windows and circulation space in between.
Village Underground rents the work spaces out on a not-for-profits basis, charging £30 a week for a five metre area (which can be split), making it extremely cost effective for small businesses that would struggle to pay market prices.
And they’re eco-friendly. The carriages themselves are recycled, they use green power, and environmentally friendly paints and sustainable timber are used throughout.
The carriages have not gone unnoticed by the local teenagers, however.
Attempts to keep the sea of graffiti at bay were abandoned after the first few jet washes, and, in the spirit of the project, a more accepting approach to spontaneous urban art adopted. "Most of it’s quite good actually," admits Foxcroft.
The Shipping News
Eric Reynolds, Managing Director of Urban Space Management, was also wrestling with the problem of providing cheap space for artists and creative start-up businesses when he came up with a beautifully simple solution – old steel shipping containers.
So he set up Container City , a project using shipping containers linked together to create a variety of shapes for housing, work spaces, and even schools.
Reynolds says: "It’s a fast, inexpensive method of creating funky modern buildings in an environmentally friendly way. The build cost can be genuinely half that of conventional methods."
Shipping containers are ideal because they’re lightweight, strong, cheap, and a plentiful resource that can’t economically be scrapped or returned to their country of origin, but, being rust resistant, are likely to last up to 50 years.
The first London Container City project, located at Trinity Buoy Wharf in the heart of Docklands, was completed six years ago in just five months.
It was originally three stories high, providing 12 work studios across 4,800 sq ft. But a fourth floor was later added to house live/work apartments. As well as being innovative in terms of design and costs, Container City I is incredibly green, with over 80 per cent of the project created from recycled material.
Container constructions can now be spotted all over London, including a five storey building in the City, a nursery, and an adult education centre in north London that was shortlisted for the 2005 RIBA Stirling Prize.
And they are no longer restricted to London. A grass-roofed construction, used as a centre for artists, has appeared in spectacular surroundings, far from the madding crowds, on the shores of Loch Long.
Even Auro Foxcroft has installed a pair of containers alongside his tube trains on the Village underground site. "They are so readily available and cheap," says Foxcroft. "This was a much easier mission."
And, though they may start off rather ugly, the finished product can be astonishingly good looking. With balconies, porthole windows, glass doors, and a range of exterior cladding, if you think outside the box almost anything appears to be possible.
Nikki Sheehan
