Town Hall Hotel & Apartments Bethnal Green, London


Words: Matt Turner Photography: Ed Reeve


Hotelier Peng Loh has commissioned Rare Architects to create a stunning hotel conversion of Bethnal Green Town Hall, combining original elements with classic Scandinavian furniture and cutting edge architectural interventions.


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ingaporean entrepreneur and hotelier Peng Loh has a track record of creating hotels in unusual buildings, in unlikely locations.


Having created Singapore’s first boutique hotel, 1929, in the city’s Red Light District he recently launched Waterhouse in Shanghai’s Shilipiu docklands, and is currently working on another Singapore hotel, Wanderlust, in Little India. But his conversion of Bethnal Green Town Hall is perhaps his most ambitious project to date. This district of London is slowly undergoing the sort of gentrification seen in neighbouring Shoreditch and Hoxton, but it remains most famous for its association with the Kray Twins in the 1960s, and retains a gritty edge to this day. The Town Hall sits beside a housing estate,


amid kebab shops and taxi firms. It became redundant with the creation of Tower Hamlets borough, and had since fallen into disrepair, having been used most recently as a backdrop for gangster films such as Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels. “When I first heard about it, I thought ‘I don’t want to go there’,” he says of the area, “but when I walked into the building, my jaw hit the floor. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity,” he says. Braver still was his decision to commission a young architectural practice with no previous experience of designing a hotel, let alone a sensitive conversion project on this scale. Loh first met Rare Architects’ Michel da Costa Goncalves and Nathalie Rozencwajg when they were lecturing in Singapore. He invited them to pitch for the project, and was


WWW.SLEEPERMAGAZINE.COM SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2010 065


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