Photographing Holloway Park for the Lee Marley Group
At the former Holloway Prison site, a closed institution is being remade as a connected piece of city.
Allford Hall Monaghan Morris’s masterplan for Peabody and London Square will deliver 985 new homes across the 4.16-hectare site, with 60% affordable housing, including 415 homes for social rent. The scheme also introduces a 1.4-acre public park, a dedicated Women’s Building, new commercial spaces, 60 Extra Care homes, and a landscape strategy that retains the green heart of the former prison while planting 364 new trees.
For Lee Marley, the work sits at the meeting point of programme, craft and sequencing.
The facade has been designed around masonry support, allowing the brickwork to progress out of sequence while time is taken to install the large-format feature stones that give the elevations their weight and character. Flemish bond brickwork with radial specials brings a measured precision to the curved and articulated elements, while GRC units are being installed on stainless steel brackets to balconies and banding, adding depth, rhythm and definition across the facades.
This is not simply a question of laying brick. It is about managing interface, tolerance, programme and permanence. The scaffolding, masonry support, brackets, wind-posts, EPDMs, fire barriers, SFS and specialist facade components all form the temporary and permanent logic behind the finished architecture.
The masterplan is divided into five plots, creating 15 buildings with distinct characters and a variety of public spaces. Each building is organised around central cores to reduce long corridors and improve efficiency, while shaped facades enhance aspect, outlook, daylight and natural ventilation. Articulated corners help separate balconies and preserve clear, unshaded views from living spaces.
Each plot carries its own material palette, responding to the surrounding neighbourhood while contributing to the identity of the wider masterplan. The result is a facade strategy rooted in craft, context and delivery: traditional masonry intelligence combined with modern methods of construction.
Founded in 1997, Lee Marley has grown into the UK’s largest integrated masonry and scaffold company, operating from London, Reading and Glasgow. Across projects of this scale, their role is to bring together the certainty of delivery with the discipline of skilled workmanship, from full material supply and installation to through-the-wall facade packages delivered by in-house teams.
At Holloway, that means building with the care such a site deserves: carefully, sequentially, and with an understanding that every support, bracket, brick and stone contributes to the final civic presence of the architecture.
And for the photographer, up in the rigging, the pure satisfaction of working with a team at the top of their game.
