This £3.4m makeover of a former basement gymnasium by 6a Architects, adding two new floors, gives a new public face and facilities to a building run by the Holborn Community Association. Lucy Bullivant paid a visit

25 November 2021 · By Lucy Bullivant. Photography by Johan Dehlin

6a Architects’ design strategy for a longstanding Holborn community organisation’s new building Holborn House demonstrates the practice’s characteristic coupling of practical, legible measures and love of narrative.

It vastly improves the facilities and increases the amount of space available for everyone living locally. The area is packed with leading cultural institutions yet there is a lot of poverty in this ward of 15,000 residents. This provides a versatile third place for the 21st century, helping support and enrich their lives.

Community members of all ages, from toddlers brought in the early morning to tumble and roll in gymnastics classes, to residents in their 80s and 90s, enter the two-storey building through a sliding door in its decorative glazed façade. A patterned silkscreen art piece, Great Things Lie Ahead, by artist Caragh Thuring, animates the generic curtain walling. This engaging treatment makes the centre appear at once protected and transparent – qualities it exudes internally.

Holborn House demonstrates the practice’s characteristic coupling of practical, legible measures and love of narrative

At night the building transforms into a light box animating the access passage spruced up with new York stone paving and planting beds by Dan Pearson. It helps the centre seamlessly connected to its wider context: Emerald Street on the east side, and on the west, the partly pedestrianised Lamb’s Conduit Street with its many independent traders – and the office of 6a Architects, who have a deep knowledge of the site and its history.

After the Second World War, on what was then a bomb site, community activity took place in Nissan huts, with a centre being built later in the late 1950s. Holborn Community Association (HCA) was founded in 1989 to expand the activities of the centre and its inclusive programme of arts, care, movement and play activities to improve wellbeing and reduce social isolation. Historically a lot of children and their families coming here were refugees, with the centre representing a safe haven for them and their parents.

Today 2,500 people attend HCA’s three centres, including Holborn House, and the Millman Community Centre nearby. There are over 25,000 attendances annually at Emerald Street, and the refurb was much needed. HCA and visitors alike had long put up with the old building’s former leaky roof, rather poky gym, cramped kitchen and relatively inaccessible entrance and circulation – although many treasure their memories of the space.

In the newly adapted building, community members have use of Emerald Hall, a 124 m2 activity space of what was originally the gym hall as well as the Green Room, a calm first-floor meeting and workshop space where activities from creative writing and English as a second language classes to art and messy play activities can take place. They can also use a small workspace overlooking the passage with framed views of the brickwork of neighbouring buildings.

The 5m high hall, with its sprung floor is used for sports like Bloomsbury Bears football for 3-6 year olds, gymnastics, martial arts, dance including bhangra and other physical activities, including for older adults as well as Xmas, wedding and children’s parties and a wide range of events including film screenings and pub quizzes. Users can adapt the Hall’s atmosphere via dimmer switches or dress it up with sports hall lighting.

Through roof-lights running across the entirety of Emerald Hall 6a has brought natural light right into the building. Their visibility at roof level from the overlooking Green Room links these two complementary spaces. Inserting an airy first floor activity-cum-viewing space overlooking it like a Royal Box with glazed windows that open, the architects have opened up a visual connection to Emerald Hall which supports sight-lines for supervision and the hall’s identity as a fun performance space.

6a has transformed and extended the old basement gymnasium by reusing its concrete infrastructure, relining and building onto it, adding a lightweight steel roof truss structure with sky views giving all the meeting spaces plenty of natural light. Well-insulated, fully accessible and low energy, the new building has a spare yet homely character.

Materials are legible and tactile; there’s an engaging palette of colour tones. Navigation around the new building is easy with John Morgan’s signage and pictograms, new logo and cast iron street sign, gently sloped entrance and robust staircase, by the façade filled with light. ‘We didn’t want a municipal feel. We need to bring culture to the community’, says 6a founding partner Steph Macdonald.

Materials are legible and tactile; there’s an engaging palette of colour tones

Through well-judged interventions that spark interest and fuse intelligently with 6a’s design the artistic input by Brussels-born Thuring shapes and finesses the building’s unique identity, rather than overwhelms it. Selected by a community panel, she was brought in at the beginning and worked with 6a throughout construction to make sure her art was well embedded into the life of the centre.

‘She treated the whole space as her canvas,’ says Macdonald. Thuring made a hand-woven brickwork fabric frieze to line the upper storey acoustic panels of Emerald Hall. Her beautifully patterned coloured tiles in the new shower rooms and kitchen evoke the work of fabric designer Enid Marx’s London Transport upholstery designs. The green tones of the metal stair rails gently suggest Holborn’s historic forest.

Thuring did tracings of local brickwork to create the façade’s mosaic of meaningful fragments of the community and its history, drawing on the centre’s archives. Her artwork, a protoglass ceramic fused silkscreen print on double glazed units, forges a dialogue between the surrounding historic building fabric and 6a’s line of new exposed roof trusses visitors can see through the glazed facade. ‘Like Georgian Meccano’, as Macdonald describes it.

The space’s openness and new facilities – including changing rooms, clubrooms and servery, and storage walls with sliding doors made of oiled Douglas fir ply in Emerald Hall – transform its quality and amenity. Holborn House was made possible financially by many bodies and firms including the Mayor of London Good Growth Fund and Sport England, and sponsorship in kind, from furniture manufacturer Arper, for example.

Through this new gem of a centre the Association can support more people and host outside hires for corporate events, launches, recitals and organisational celebrations needed to run the space and in turn support its work. Lucy Bullivant is a place strategist, curatorial director and author

Start on site April 2020 Completion date September 2021 Gross internal floor area 398m2 Form of contract or procurement route Traditional contract Construction cost £1.93m Construction cost per m2 £4850 Architect 6a architects Artist Caragh Thuring Client Holborn Community Association (HCA) Typography and signage John Morgan Studio Structural engineer Price & Myers M&E consultant Richie Daffin QS Jackson Coles Landscape consultant Dan Pearson Studio CDM advisor Mansafe Project manager Bidwells Principal designer 6a Architects Approved building inspector SWECO Main contractor Quinn London

Tags 6a Architects Community centre Holborn

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