This image Cockpit Arts has been in Deptford since 2002, occupying – and, most cleverly, acquiring – a four-storey 1960s ofice block right by Deptford Creek


BRIEF ENCOUNTERS


Veronica Simpson takes heart in a newly improved maker facility in Deptford that ticks all the boxes for adaptive reuse, cultural and social sustainability, and arts education


PRESERVING STUDIO and maker space in London has been a losing game for the past decade, with artists repeatedly priced or pushed out of the market by speculative development and greedy landlords. A July 2023 article in Te Guardian estimated that a third of visual artists in London were struggling to pay for studios. Plaster magazine, in 2024, reported that 24% of the capital’s studio space was at risk of closure. And yet one enterprising central London charity, with the support of the Mayor of London and Lewisham Council, has managed to fund and programme an ingenious refurbishment to its current building that provides vital new


facilities, a greater public presence in the community, and boosts studio spaces from 60 to 80.


Cockpit Arts has been in Deptford since 2002, occupying – and, most cleverly, acquiring – a four-storey 1960s office block right by Deptford Creek. When it opened here, pretty much its only neighbours were a cluster of sturdy, brown brick, post-war local authority housing blocks – until the shimmering polycarbonate curves of the Laban Dance Centre, by Herzog & de Meuron, landed in 2003. Tat landmark for contemporary dance culture has long since been overshadowed by giant tower blocks of


unlovely apartments, cheaply, colourfully (and mostly tastelessly) built by the usual volume housebuilders.


Yet, in 2015, when developers proposed knocking down the Cockpit Arts building as part of the Sun Wharf mixed-use masterplan, Cockpit, as owner-occupiers, were in a position to resist, and recruited support from Lewisham Council on the grounds that the existing building could be reworked to offer more in the way of community education and interaction, while fostering creative enterprise and neighbourhood cohesion. To that end, it secured £1m funding from the Mayor of London’s Good Growth fund and brought


PETER LANDERS


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