Commendation for best mixed-use development
Power switch
There is an old photograph of Gainsborough Studios in 1946 showing it still looked like the old power station it had been when it served an East London railway line. It was a local landmark by virtue of its tall brick chimney stack of the kind that Fred Dibnah liked to climb as a steeplejack. It was a gaunt building then, towering above the neighbouring mean houses and an estate of prefabs, but its remains are still recognisable in the present Gainsborough Studios, now restored, converted and extended by Lincoln Holdings.
The original power station became redundant after the First World War and was first converted into Islington Studios in 1919 by the American film company Famous Players-Lasky. Hit by the slump in Wall Street, they sold it in 1924 to Michael Balcon, who turned it into Gainsborough Studios, with its famous logo of a lady in a picture hat bowing to the audience, based on Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait of the actress Sarah Siddons.
Many famous actors, producers and directors worked there, including Jessie Matthews, Will Hay, Boris Karloff, Margaret Lockwood and the great British film director Alfred Hitchcock, who is now commemorated by an enormous head made of Corten steel by the sculptor Anthony Donaldson. The studios closed during the Second World War, but reopened in 1946 in the ownership of J Arthur Rank, but finally closed for good in 1949 – a fact recorded on a plaque put up by the London Borough of Hackney.
For the next 50 years the building lay empty or was used occasionally as a warehouse. There were a few unsuccessful attempts to revive it for film-making or convert it into a Mecca bingo hall, but its fate seemed sealed when Galliard Homes bought it in 1998, proposing to convert into loft apartments.
However, it was then resold in 2002 to Lincoln Holdings, who commissioned architects Munkenbeck + Marshall to restore, convert and extend the building to create a highclass mixed-use development of four buildings named North, East, South and West Studios around a central courtyard. These now have 213 private apartments of which 80 are live/work units, plus 40 affordable apartments for Southern Housing Group, of which 32 are in shared ownership. The prices of the apartments for sale have ranged from £240,000 up to £1 million for a penthouse. There are also 148 underground parking spaces, which are priced separately at
£25,000 each.
Lincoln Holdings’ director Stephen Friel hoped it would be possible for the South Studio building (which was the original studios, eight storeys high inside) to be used for film-making, but he has had to accept that it will not happen. However, there is still a film studio and an editing suite among the commercial uses on the ground floor, which include offices, a restaurant and an art gallery. The rest of the four buildings are now apartments with views over Shoreditch Park, with a pedestrian walkway alongside the previously inaccessible Grand Union Canal. After 55 years, someone has breathed life into the powerful building again.
HomeBuilder: LINCOLN HOLDINGS PLC
Unit A, North Block, Gainsborough Studios, 1 Poole Street,
London N1 5EB
Tel 020 7388 2288 Fax 020 7681 0022
Contact: Stephen Friel, Director
Website: www.lincolnholdings.co.uk
Architects: MUNKENBECK + MARSHALL
135 Curtain Road, London EC2A 3BX
Tel 020 7739 3300 Fax 020 7739 3390
Contact: Stephen Marshall, Partner
Email: steve@mandm.uk.com
Website: www.mandm.uk.com
Photography: MORLEY VON STERNBERG (07850 367514)