Cheap studio space made Bethnal Green a favourite with artists. But now others are moving into this part of east London. Ellis Woodman looks at how Stephen Taylor Architects’ new residential project copes with a tight street layout that is a legacy of the area’s less affluent past.
Building Design, a weekly paper for architects is running an article (free registration required) about the history of the Nichol in Bethnal Green, from Arthur Morrison’s 1896 novel A Child of the Jago through the 1990’s “Young British Artists” who descended on the place and left quite a bit of unique architecture behind.
Now it seems there are a bunch of new plans and projects underway to turn yet more of the area into £450,000 studios and flats. Chance Street is to be made over into an office space and dwellings complete with concertina gates and fashionable, but tiny rooms, even by London standards.
Sort of a cross between “modern” office building and university dormitory, the building says two things to me:
- “You can’t afford to live here, you’re neighborhood is now off limits to you.”
- “Serendipity is not in an architect’s vocabulary.”
Blah.
These are the ramblings of 
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