Photographed for Harper Tackley
I’ve photographed countless buildings over the years – some ephemeral, some eternal – but few possess the presence, the muscle memory, the resonance of Woolwich Works.
How do you photograph not just architecture, but the echoes inside it? How do you make visible three centuries of invention, labour, war and empire, and the civic optimism now binding them together again?
Because this is no ordinary cultural venue. It’s a palimpsest: a layered essay in British history, military ingenuity, and civic reinvention. What was once the Woolwich Arsenal : a secret city of weapons, maps, chemicals and empire, is now something audacious and new: a cultural quarter for London, carved from the very bones of its industrial past.
Originally built to arm the British empire, the Arsenal employed tens of thousands in wartime, including the famed Canary Girls whose skin turned yellow from working with TNT. These walls also housed scientists, artists, cartographers. The Royal Military Academy was here.
The “rockets’ red glare” in The Star-Spangled Banner? Those rockets were designed by Sir William Congreve at Woolwich. The first percussion bullet was produced here in 1889; over 7 billion were manufactured and used in the Great War. It’s a potent, and terrifying, history.
Each building has its own story. You don’t just walk through them; you pass through layers of British history: from Georgian munitions to Victorian pageantry, from Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks (first performed with Woolwich-made rockets in Green Park) to the whirring dance of Punchdrunk’s immersive theatre.
The architectural intervention, by Bennetts Associates with conservation architects Consarc, is mercifully light of touch. That’s a compliment. We too often flatten the past in pursuit of the future. But here, the patina of work, the soot, the gouged brick, the scars of manufacture, has been embraced rather than erased. Roof trusses soar unapologetically; walls breathe with memory. It’s been carefully edited, not rewritten.
It would have been easy, painfully easy, to convert this into luxury flats. But the Royal Borough of Greenwich had other ideas. Seventy percent of the space is reserved for cultural organisations and local groups at subsidised rates. The remaining thirty percent supports this cultural ecology through commercial tenants who understand they’re joining something larger than themselves.
These buildings waited in silence for someone to bring them to life. The Arsenal has been patient. Now, as light spills through restored windows and music filters from soundproofed rehearsal studios, the place is reborn, a new kind of ingenious city; celebrating creativity, joy and peace.
NLA award winner RIBA National award winner London Design Awards winner
Buro Happold | Sound Space Vision | Mace
