Gatti Routh Rhodes’ mixed-use building for Bethnal Green Mission Church is an exemplar of its type, finds Matthew Lloyd

Words
Matthew Lloyd
Photos
Jack Hobhouse

East London is full of historic church sites in varying states of decay. There are multiple reasons for this: changing populations; lack of money; declining church attendance; original fabric poorly made and hard to maintain. After widespread bombing in the second world war, very basic replacement churches built in the 1950s and 1960s exacerbated this sense of decline. For decades the problem has been to find the resources to save this history and reinvigorate these communities. A partial solution has sometimes been to sell sites to other Christian denominations, and even to other religions, or to developers for change of use. Alternatively, if there is enough available land, complete redevelopment is possible, usually by incorporating housing to fund entirely new church buildings.

And so, on urban corners in the 1980s and 1990s, small churches with adjoining flats were built. Too often, these were typical of the mediocre public architecture of the period. But now, with a more urgent need for housing coupled with greater architectural and planning ambition, higher-quality, higher-density solutions for these sites have sprung up. Bethnal Green Mission Church (BGMC) is the latest iteration of this renewal, and has turned out to be a model of the type.

The robust urban block on Cambridge Heath Road, east London, lies within a conservation area and replaces a 1950s building. Its facades comprise a regular concrete grid, with brick infill panels in a raking monk bond.

The story here began, as is so often is the case for ‘social’ architecture, with a young architectural practice, Gatti Routh Rhodes, being asked by a prospective developer to see what could be created on the site. The brief was to clear away entirely an existing 1953 block and design a new church and supporting rooms, with enough new private sale housing around and above to make a viable development project.

Such a scheme has four key requirements: to ensure wholesale re-provision of the existing D1 uses while trading away the normally required social housing for the public benefit offered; to provide enough private sale housing to fund the whole package; to create enough profit to keep the developer interested and involved all the way through to completion; and finally, the model requires good – or good enough – land values in order to be deliverable. This equation is more often than not hard to achieve, especially on tight urban land where each stakeholder needs to maximise its own slice of the development cake.

The building’s basement, ground and first floors are public and constructed from concrete. Above, four residential storeys are formed from cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels.

The Bethnal Green Mission Church project is a delight throughout. It is a low-budget scheme, but shows quality and considered detailing that testifies, undoubtedly, to Gatti Routh Rhodes’ energy and perseverance over many years. Though it was a design & build scheme, with the architects having only limited input during the construction phase, there’s very little evidence of ‘dumbing down’ and instead the architects’ inventiveness and skill shine through.

From the south, the new building on Cambridge Heath Road now defines a little urban quarter all of its own. This location is a famous part of east London, rich in history and character. Just along and over the road, by the tube station, sits Sir John Soane’s noble grade-I-listed church, St John on Bethnal Green, with its vertical white stone pilasters between wide stock brick bays. Over the road, Caruso St John’s singular extension to the Museum of Childhood is another illustrious architectural neighbour. The heavy, raised Victorian railway line running out of Liverpool Street to Essex forms a hard barrier westwards. In contrast, directly to the east across Cambridge Heath Road is Museum Gardens Park, affording long views from the new building’s upper levels. Finally, to the south-west, an isolated terrace of narrow Georgian houses– charmingly named Paradise Row, despite the district’s tough history – aligns the railway and nicely frames the church’s setting on this side.

Adjacent to the church and its 14 flats is a black brick hotel building by a different team, constructed at the same time. Luckily, the church building – clad in pale brick and white precast stonework – sits in strong contrast to its neighbour. The starkly different outcomes clearly define and separate two components of a single urban block.

The crossed beams spanning the church penetrate into the office spaces above, and natural light is introduced in the gaps between them.

Externally, the BGMC building is controlled by a continuous grid of precast stone elements laid over each elevation. This approach is currently fashionable in housing design, but here lends an unusually delicate grain to the facades. Within the grid sit either strips of flush windows with Juliet balconies, or inset balconies, or bleached brickwork panels with a cleverly coursed diaper pattern. The architects have taken cues both from Soane for this pilaster effect, and from the little Georgian terrace for its rhythm, scale and colouring. The strict order is broken only by the needs of the church architecture: a chapel space inside presents itself in a different, ecclesiastical window design of tall, slotted openings in the centre of the south-facing elevation.

The main entrance to the church is around the corner, facing the busy Cambridge Heath Road. The ecclesiastical craftsmanship often left out of these developer-driven projects is noticeably resurrected in its special masonry detailing and careful bespoke metalwork and signage.

Inside, the church accommodation is inventive. A clever section through the lower floors unexpectedly allows both the chapel and the church hall to be double-height volumes, the former occupying the ground and first floors, the latter the ground and a spacious basement. A small and simply planned community cafe sits snugly in the south-east corner.

The central chapel is a jewel. This is always a difficult space to create: symbolically and intrinsically the heart of the project, it is so often treated as a ‘wallpaper’ exercise in similar schemes. Here a remarkable concrete latticed soffit spans this rectangular volume, transforming it into an extraordinary space, centring the church within the whole and encompassing its key symbolism.

Where these diagonal beams hit the side walls at the ceiling, open pockets form internal windows into first-floor office spaces on either side. Within the lattice, nicely detailed acoustic panels sit tightly up inside. The chapel is lit by the big south-facing window, with stained-glass whose pattern is cleverly taken from the ceiling’s design.

The remaining, though larger, part of the building is required for 14 private-sale flats: mixed-sized dwellings arranged over four floors above the public parts. Internally, the flats have a micro-quality that befits the building’s tight density, and lower-than-usual ceilings suit this petite scale. Highly detailed inset balconies, unusually lined in bespoke metal panels, further reinforce a tailored design quality that never flags throughout this most admirable development.

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