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creativity and ingenuity – not to mention craftsmanship – with which all these elements are deployed is what makes these pods far more chic than shabby. Pearce Plus was also asked to create the ‘anti-classroom’ education room, which has the feel of a large and welcoming, adult-friendly playspace.
Owen Pearce describes the Collective as a very ‘hands-on’ client. Georgie Grant, now director, happily recalls the group’s response to Taylor’s first sketches, when they asked for a building that would exude joy. But as construction approached and the working drawings emerged, with everything looking a bit too ‘beige and boring’, as Prendergast describes it, she herself took the drawing and started colouring it in with much bolder shades and stripes. Te finished building is far from boring – Oliver Wainwright in the Guardian describes it nicely as a ‘piratical encampment’. Te pink tinge in the concrete came from using local red sandstone aggregate. When it was suggested this be value-engineered out for the more usual grey,
the Collective put its combined (and formidable) feet down. And anyone who spends time in this welcoming outcrop will feel very glad for that decision: its rosy contours are part of East Quay’s message that this is something far from ordinary. Now jewelers, sculptors, photographers and furniture designers are installed in the studios. Other tenants include geological consultancy Geckoella, which runs workshops and talks among their rock collections, and a fully equipped print studio, which operates on a membership model. Two Rivers paper mill is also based in the ground floor. Te calm industry of their paper making – pulping cotton fibres, pouring the mulch into moulds, pressing sheets of paper and hanging them on racks to dry – shouldn’t mislead anyone that this is some cottage industry: they actually produce some of the UK’s finest watercolour paper. If there is a spirit of improvisation in its design and inhabitation, the Collective’s wider mission is far more serious. Grant says: ‘Te plan for this space was to create 37 jobs, and then we
realised that wasn’t enough. We needed to create an industry.’ Tey looked at insect farming for food, ‘but the market isn’t there yet’. Tere was a proposal to move into biomaterials for construction, ‘but then the pandemic happened and it was all too much.’ Plan C is construction blocks made from mushroom pulp. But Grant was, when we spoke, daunted by the prospect of ‘the energy bills going up by 630%’. Prendergast adds: ‘Our whole business is community focused regeneration. How can towns flourish? [And] not through having external developers come in and make lots of money out of us, in the usual extractive way?’ Small wonder this impassioned crew are now popular speakers at regeneration and political conferences.
In the meantime, a year into operation, their East Quay arts space is drawing new visitors to the town. Says Prendergast: ‘We expected in our first year about 100,000 and maybe 45,000 to the galleries. We have ended up with 198,000 and galleries just under double, at 72,000.’ On that front, at least, mission accomplished.
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