Our project connects the Tufnell Park Road and Holloway Road, via a series of courtyards around which are composed some new and refurbished brick blocks housing flats above, with a series of workshops and small shops at ground floor.

The site is the home of the National Youth Theatre. We are providing NYT with new and improved accommodation as well as making their presence on the site more visible and accessible to the public. A number of existing artisanal workshops and studios will be re-housed in new or refurbished accommodation.

We see the new buildings as versions of the Victorian Warehouses and Palazzo types that currently exist there, and have tried to find an appropriate architectural character for a deep city block that can mediate between ‘high street’ and the domestic hinterland of the site. Currently the site is occupied by light industrial buildings that are under-used, and it is landlocked and mostly surrounded by tall walls.

Our aim is to make the site porous for pedestrians, and in doing so to solve some of the problems of anti-social behaviour that exist in the ill-defined territory around the modernist housing blocks neighbouring the site. We are attempting to heal the rifts in the urban fabric caused by twentieth century planning policy, and to create in its place a mixed neighbourhood capable of supporting daily life and being transformed by theatrical use – a proper city quarter.