From disused factories to former shops, urban buildings are being turned into arts venues

As addresses go, 35 Factory Road does not sound promising. Neither does it look like much from a distance: a scabrous, 1950s industrial shed with a jumble of post-war offices and Victorian warehouses attached. But the developers behind The Beams – as this former Tate & Lyle factory complex in Silvertown on the riverside fringes of east London now calls itself – have big ambitions. When it opens this autumn (subject to final planning approval), they say it will be transformed into a 55,000 sq ft venue for “21st century modes of cultural production” – gigs, club nights, film sets, artists’ studios, fashion shows and so on.

“This would otherwise be derelict industrial land,” says Luke Huxham, director of development at Broadwick Live, the company behind the project, as he shows me around. “We want to honour its industrial past.”

There are endless original Crittall-style windows, an elegant mesh of exposed metal beams and pillars that throw geometric shadows across the concrete floor, and the original roller hatches, all of which still lie behind the shed’s corrugated-iron walls. Far from being ugly, it is exhilarating.

The Beams is the latest arts and entertainment venue to spring up in empty and redundant buildings, which typically are prime candidates for demolition: former factories, department stores, offices and pubs.

This month, Fabien Riggall, founder of the immersive events company Secret Cinema, said he planned to turn the former Allders department store in Croydon into a venue for a mysterious new arts concept called Lost, which promises to “redefine culture, reframe space and build a new form of art” with “a disruptive force set to regenerate forgotten high streets and subvert the current system”. 

The Allders building has been empty for years. In fact, more than 80 per cent of department stores closed between 2016 and 2021 according to property information firm CoStar, which means more opportunities for conversions. But the pandemic and a faltering economy have left town centres struggling. Lost could have a challenge on its hands.

The Beams, too, will have to persuade culture-lovers to trek down Factory Road. If all goes to plan, this part of town will eventually become a £3.5 billion “waterside destination”. Huxham is banking on Londoners’ appetite for discovery and exploration after two years of lockdowns, but he concedes “there are lots of challenges”.

Yet Huxham and Riggall are clearly onto something. We tend to assume buildings, other than landmark industrial conversions like Tate Modern and the grand monuments and buildings listed by Historic England, have natural lives that somehow end. They are therefore disposable, like fast fashion. The average life of a commercial building in Britain is just 40 years.

But the case for converting modest Cinderella structures like 35 Factory Road is strong. Fifty-thousand buildings are demolished every year, generating about two-thirds of all UK waste, according to the Architects’ Journal’s RetroFirst campaign. The construction industry is responsible for about 10 per cent of annual UK emissions, mostly because, when buildings are destroyed, the so-called “embodied carbon” within them – the carbon emissions associated with their construction and operation – goes to waste.

Unfortunately, the tax system often incentivises demolition over refurbishment. But it’s not just rubble we chuck away.

“Communities have great attachment to the buildings within their neighbourhoods, and that is often not understood by those in power,” says Will Hurst, an AJ editor who is leading the campaign. “There’s a lack of imagination in terms of thinking: ‘Actually we’ve got something workable here that can revitalise the cultural offer of a place.’”

Take for example the Really Local Group, which last year in Reading turned a long-empty former Argos into a cinema and workspace. “Imagine the most no-hope building, not used in a decade,” says Preston Benson, its founder. “Grey slab concrete pillars, a grey box.” The refit is clean, bright, and unembellished: “The real luxury is the space – you don’t need brass everywhere.” But convincing audiences to give it a try during intermittent Covid restrictions was not easy. “It was a slog at first,” says Benson.

Yet it can work. Two weeks ago, Really Local opened another arts and cinema complex, this time in a converted former nightclub in Ealing. “That was the opposite,” says Benson. “We’ve sold 2,000 memberships in the first month, and 7,000 tickets in the first 12 days.”

Even dilapidated buildings matter to people. Katy Ghahremani, a director at Make Architects, which is currently transforming Hornsey Town Hall, in north London, into an arts centre and hotel, says “listening to people and their stories to find out what’s important” is a vital part of a refurbishment, “because we miss things.”

The restoration focuses on details that may seem insignificant, from the war memorial to the plaques on the benches outside.

Will this newfound enthusiasm for turning friendless buildings into cultural venues lead to an aesthetic shift? Are we moving away from white-cube venues and towards a grungier, low-key industrial look? Anthony Engi Meacock, an architect with Assemble Studios, thinks so. “A lot of contemporary art is about reuse, and there’s a demand to reflect that in the buildings,” he says.

Meacock worked on the 2018 transformation of an 80-year-old pump house attached to swimming baths in New Cross, south-east London, into the Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art. It was an unadorned and awkward building, tall and deep with cast-iron water tanks on the roof.

Tangles of industrial piping have been left exposed, layers of brick and tiles with their scars and fractures are undisturbed, and the water tanks preserved and turned into galleries.

Even major, multi-billion-pound restorations are grittier than they used to be. When it opens as a retail complex in the autumn, visitors to the refitted Battersea Power Station will see much of the original industrial machinery that, until the 1980s, powered a fifth of London: dusty, gnarly and retained to enhance spaces for art installations, music and performance.

Not everyone believes in the value of preserving old buildings that could be adapted, for artistic purposes or otherwise. Last year, Nadine Dorries, the Culture Secretary, overrode Historic England’s recommendation to list the late art-deco Dorman Long coal storage tower in Redcar, and it was immediately demolished. Dorries said her reason for doing so was because the tower was “essentially a functional structure”.

You could, of course, say the same about any building. But not everyone is keen on tearing them down, either. A private members’ bill, introduced into the House of Commons by Jerome Mayhew MP, calls for embodied carbon in buildings to be regulated and reduced. If successful, it could ultimately lead to fewer demolitions.

That could mean more projects like 35 Factory Road. “Back in the day, architectural designers really cared about making a good, functioning workspace,” says architect Alex Sprogis, “and so we want to preserve that. We’ve kept it feeling like a place of production.”

It is striking how light-touch the renovation is. Other than making the venue safe for crowds, much of the gnarliness of its manufacturing past remains. In fact, for gig-goers, it will feel very much like being in a factory.

“These are exciting spaces as they are,” says Huxham. “We want visitors to feel they have discovered something a bit raw, a bit untainted.”

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