When I first walked London Square Bermondsey, what struck me was not the new architecture but the composure of the ground itself. That composure belongs to Allford Hall Monaghan Morris. Their masterplan steadies the entire enterprise. Routes are clarified, thresholds are calibrated, scale shifts with careful control.
On a former industrial estate, once defined by the tannery trade and later by Crosse and Blackwell’s long occupation, that steadiness is not aesthetic restraint. It is an ethical position. Without it, the site would fragment into competing gestures.
The Tannery by Coffey Architects sits within that field of order. It benefits from it and, crucially, does not attempt to outshine it. The complexity of such sites is rarely visible in photographs. Contaminated ground, compromised structures, mismatched floor plates, the friction between industrial proportions and domestic expectations. Integration is not a romantic act. It is technical, legal, financial and spatial all at once. What interests me is how little strain the project shows.
Unit 12, the retained warehouse, is handled with care. The added storeys are legible yet not confrontational. The seam between old brick and new work is articulated with precision. There is no faux historicism and no aggressive contrast. The building reads as continuous, as though time has simply thickened it. That is difficult to achieve. One senses that Coffey understood the warehouse not as an artefact to be displayed but as a piece of working fabric to be reorganised and reinhabited.
The new residential block, the ‘Bar of Light’, could have been assertive to the point of disruption. Instead it relies on clarity. Its perforated aluminium screen gives it a luminous quality, but the expression is disciplined. The shutters are operable, inhabited. They register life rather than impose form. Because AHMM have already established hierarchy and proportion in the masterplan, this building can afford a degree of articulation. Expression is permitted because the urban framework is intelligent.
I find the relationship between mixed tenure, affordable studios, gallery space, private housing particularly telling. These are not easy adjacencies. They require a spatial diplomacy, notoriously difficult to achieve.
What makes the project persuasive is the dialogue between overview and intervention. AHMM provide the calm and legibility that prevent the site from dissolving into noise. Coffey respond with moments of measured expression that animate that calm. It is a conversation across practices, across time, across the residue of industry and the demands of contemporary life.
In the end, what lingers is not a single image but a sense of coherence. On a reused site of this complexity, coherence the most compelling achievement.
London Square Bermondsey photographed for AHMM February 2024
