IN-PERSON London. Section B

Abstract

Britain’s housing crisis is often presented as a problem of numbers, a shortfall in industrial production. Too little is it considered as a failure of community-building. Yet behind the numbers lies an epidemic of loneliness among older people. It has become an increasingly common practice to relocate over-60s away from urban centres. Moreover, almost all forms of collective housing available to older generations take the form of a retreat. From private retirement communities to sheltered housing or historic almshouses, each model is a type of retreat, an enclave distanced from the life of the wider community. Yet, as people live longer and remain active, not everyone wants to withdraw from the bustle of the city. In Bermondsey, south London, Witherford Watson Mann Architects and United St Saviours, a local charity of almost 500 years’ standing, set out the ambition to re-interpret the traditional almshouse. This involved not just designing a building, but collaborating to imagine a community within the city, an ‘almshouse for the twenty-first century’: challenging the model of retreat and looking beyond the simple provision of housing, instead imagining the new almshouse as the hub of an intergenerational hosting network, a set of rooms to share with like-minded organisations. Appleby Blue sits directly at the street edge, and contains communal rooms including the two-storey Garden Room, a civic space shared by residents and outside groups; and cookery school, which challenges the template that meals are cooked by staff just for residents, instead enabling residents and external organisations to cook together, learn from each other and create shared meals. Like traditional coaching inns, a courtyard garden sits at the centre, with individual apartments on all sides, accessed by covered galleries like the balconies of a theatre.