Plot 10, Somers Town, London review – an object lesson in child's play

Adam Khan’s inspired reinvention of an inner London children’s play project is an example to all our cash-strapped councils

Really, this shouldn’t be a rarity: a public building, providing a much-needed service to local children, to-the-point and thoughtful, that together with some new social housing forms part of a larger ensemble, which helps to shape a public green space and playground, with which the new building will interact. But, since disempowered local authorities mostly lack the resources to create such things, Adam Khan Architects’ new project in central Somers Town is in fact unusual.

Somers Town, just north of central London, is a place like none other, an accidental enclave formed from the offcuts of historic transport engineering – the tracks out of Euston Station, the busy Euston Road – and by modern grands projets such as the British Library and the Francis Crick Institute for biomedical research. It had a history of overcrowding and poverty – for example a street called “Little Hell” in the 1890s, whose houses were described in the 1920s as “dilapidated, neglected, insanitary, verminous and dangerous” – and of pioneering responses to those conditions. An early housing association, the St Pancras House Improvement Society, was founded there in 1924, and a few years later the London county council built the Ossulston Estate, a project visibly inspired by great housing projects that the socialist government of Vienna was building at the same time.

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from Children | The Guardian https://ift.tt/37YoaFE