WORKING ARCHITECTURE GROUP [WAG]

We have been working on a number of architecture projects in and around East London’s up and coming Homerton area. These include a new build eco house on Fenn St, which will be going on site later this year, an eco bar in Bohemia Place, currently in planning, and the remodelling of a house on Kenworthy Road. One other project, which has thrown up lots of interesting local London history, is a feasibility study for a housing developer, for the former Convent of the Sacred Heart, on the corner of Kenworthy Road and Hassett Road.

This triangular site contains two main building blocks, with gardens and a courtyard. The square shaped building near the centre of the site, which is Grade II listed, was built around 1800 by Leny Smith, a local silk manufacturer, as Sidney House and Estate. The house was bought by the Catholic Church at the end of the nineteenth century, to be used as a convent. The original house was extended with a new wing to the north west, and a new block was added to the east at this time. The complex has remained intact and in excellent condition since then, with the exception of a lift block added to the south façade of the original building during the nineteen eighties. Particularly notable, are the main staircase, and some hallway plaster moldings.

The main entrance to the original Sidney House was from the north, accessed by a driveway from Sidney Road, as Kenworthy Road was called until 1939. Sidney Road was itself previously the northern section of Wick Lane, an ancient Hackney route leading from the mills of the Knights Templar’s estate to the north east (on the site still known as Temple Mills), down south along Kenworthy Road, crossing the Hackney Brook (which presumably now runs culverted below Wick Road), across what is now the eastern edge of Victoria Park, before finishing along the only stretch of road that is still called Wick Lane, in Old Ford.
The gardens of the Sidney House extended west of Sidney Road for almost a mile, and were one of many luxury estates that existed in Homerton from the Tudor period, formed out of the extensive lands of the Knights Templar in this area. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the village was the home of Homerton College, which still exists within the University of Cambridge, if not any longer in Homerton itself. Eton College too, had a presence here. The construction of the North London railway in the middle of the nineteenth century, with the now long demolished Victoria Park station near the southern end of Kenworthy Road, turned the area into something of a leisure destination among the north London middle classes for a while. However, the spread of Victorian developer housing, and the construction of two workhouses, which would later became Homerton and Hackney hospitals during the various fevers that hit London in the mid nineteenth century, meant that the middle and upper classes largely left the area. However, in recent years the gentrification of the areas around Victoria Park, have lead huge increase in local property values, and the Olympic Village site, less than half a mile to the east, promises a major revival in the areas fortunes.

In our approach to developing the site , we sought to reestablish the importance of Sidney House within the site, by clearing away minor ancillary Victorian buildings in front of the old house. We proposed that the eastern Victorian block be developed as 4-6 affordable housing flats, whilst the Sidney House building, together with its west wing extension, contained 11 luxury flats. These have been organised so that the most important architectural spaces and moldings stay coherent and intact. All flats would have a garden or balcony space, and the roofs had courtyard gardens incorporated into them. It is possible to have a site wide environmental strategy. Solar Heating panels could be sited at roof level, as might a wind turbine. There is space at ground level to store the plant required for energy distribution, rainwater harvesting and greywater recycling.