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Right, from top The pods are furnished either with salvaged or hand-crafted elements, combined with great creativity by Pearce+. Each pod offers quirky views across the arts complex or wider Watchet landscape
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS
A playful new arts centre in a Somerset town aims to regenerate the town’s cultural and tourist offer and turbo charge the local economy. Veronica Simpson is sold on this new model of community-driven, arts-led regeneration
I HAVE experienced buildings as inhabited cliff faces before, but usually they are tall buildings: rugged concrete edifices (the Barbican, for example), with embedded balconies that make you feel as if you are a bird, surveying the landscape from your private eyrie. East Quay Watchet is not about private eyries. It is a very public cliff face: a friendly, three-storey version that lounges beside the harbour of this Somerset town. It nestles into the pre-Jurassic geology and echoes that local rockbed in its red, pink and grey tones, its sprawling form inviting the public up the open staircases and along its terraces. Anyone should feel they can access its friendly, concrete contours. And yet it is no less impressive, on so many fronts, than its bigger, more brutalist, cliff-face cousins.
East Quay, an assemblage of galleries, artist studios, restaurant, shops, and holiday pods, is the brainchild of a group of local women, mostly parents with young children, many of them ex-Londoners who had moved here for the rolling Somerset landscape, fresh air and cheaper property. Tey were, however, frustrated
by the lack of cultural and creative facilities and the sad cloud of economic decline that had settled over the town in recent decades – its once vibrant harbour closed in the 1990s, and a local paper mill closed in 2015, taking with it a fifth of the local jobs. Tough that hadn’t happened when their plans started gestating. Over conversations in playgrounds and pubs, they became convinced that a contemporary arts and food-led visitor attraction could massively improve the quality of life in this small town, enriching local creative education and resources, but also boosting the economy thanks to a more dynamic offer than the simple attractions of its vintage waterfront shops and inns.
Tey established themselves as a community interest company called the Onion Collective (for their many layers). Luckily, among the core team of 22, they have business, marketing and TV production skills, as well as arts education, tourism and sustainable development experience. But one of their most potent ingredients was the self-belief that came from two founding members, Jess Prendergast and
Left Each of the five
accommodation pods created by Pearce+ is unique. This one features grafiti by artist Andy Council
Opposite page Invisible Studio's quirky design evolved out of close consultation with clients Onion Collective
her sister Naomi Griffith, whose own upbringing was far from conventional: their parents moved the family to an abandoned, 1933 BBC radio transmitter on the edge of Watchet and promptly turned its more bunker-like spaces into a 40-tank aquarium, still thriving as Tropiquaria, the local zoo. Te pair had already demonstrated social entrepreneurial form, thanks to setting up a successful space for skateboarders in Minehead. Te Collective also knew that they could do better than a failed mixed-use development project that was proposed for this site back in the ‘00s by Urban Splash, but which fell foul of the 2008 recession. Tey also had the luck to attract one of architecture’s more maverick talents in Piers Taylor of Invisible Studio, who has been part of the team since 2014. As the Onion Collective brainstormed facilities, Taylor started sketching out forms inspired by the makeshift and evolutionary nature of the coastline, as well as the nautical flotsam and the pert, brightly- painted, railway signal boxes that pop up along the coast line. He proposed a phased construction, starting with key facilities – restaurant, paper mill, studio and shop spaces, plus the main gallery – in its robust ground storey, with additional elements to be layered on top as and when.
Tey managed to convince the local council to fund a feasibility study, which was persuasive enough to secure them a £5.3m grant from the government’s Coastal Communities Fund. In the end, they raised £7m, which enabled the whole thing to be constructed far more quickly than anticipated, with Ellis Williams as executive architects. Onion Collective themselves commissioned the delightfully individual yet cosy, self-catering pods which are scattered across the structure (hired out on a nightly basis) from local architecture and design studio Pearce Plus. Each one offers interesting vistas within the complex and out to sea. Using salvaged elements from local junkyards, lashings of plywood,
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