Bethnal Green Road is a dense, ad hoc artery of East London layered with textile history. In the 19th century it was a hub for silk weaving and later a center for garment and wholesale textile production. Much of the industry has closed shop, leaving just a few surviving fabric shops and tailors, and the nearby Weavers Fields park and recently renamed Weaver train line. Redevelopment often preserves history only in name: nearby housing schemes like The Silk District nod to this past, while replacing the buildings and trades that defined it. But there is another option to work with what remains.
469 Bethnal Green Road, a former textile factory and warehouse built in the 1970s, is a brick building that once seemed too ordinary to notice. Its ground-floor openings were bricked up creating a dysfunctional and scary street corner, its facade inert, and its presence muted, but it embodied the rugged utilitarian character that defines this stretch of high street.
Carmody Groarke, a London-based architecture firm, has added three new stories, more than doubling its size, and wrapped these additions in a galvanized steel. Both street-facing facades, with previously blank walls now have floor-to-ceiling glazing, and the brickwork has been painted in a gray hue of the steel, opening the interior to the street and restoring a sense of safety and invitation. This is an experiment in whether transparency can transform a place that once repelled passerby. When I walked past last year, just after the fencing came down, its new look was already scarred by graffiti and cracked glass, issues that were quickly fixed as the ground floor gets ready to welcome its tenant, a new cafe from the team behind Exmouth Coffee Company.
Carmody Groarke’s confidence with galvanized steel goes back to its 2012 studio for sculptor Antony Gormley. That early exploration, said cofounder Kevin Carmody, set the tone for Bethnal Green Road: “One really interesting thing about galvanizing is that it’s seen as an industrial process. It’s an incredibly robust way to stop oxidization in steel, but to maintain that authenticity, that robustness of this thin layer of galvanizing, you need to pre-drill everything.” It is this precision that elevates the industrial look to something much more refined. “Some panels almost have a grain, like quarried stone; that is all entirely dictated by the bath’s temperature and chemical reaction,” he added. Tower Hamlets planners were unconvinced, rejecting the scheme for its extra height and concerns “that galvanized steel has the potential to appear very crude”, but subsequently overturned at appeal.
Now complete, the folded, spangled skin—each panel pre-drilled and dipped exactly as Carmody Groarke specified—wraps the 3-story addition and recasts the once-anonymous warehouse as a quietly different addition to Bethnal Green Road, but one that evolves out of its former image. Retaining the 1970s shell, an inset steel frame works like a permanent prop: It shortens the original beam spans while taking the new floors’ loads, letting the old and new structures read side-by-side instead of replacing the existing frame, and skirting the subsoil which is owned by Transport for London from nine meters (29.5 feet) below the site.
The structure is a composite of old, new, steel, concrete, and timber. It reveals a curious material culture as this interaction varies rising up the floors. Original clay pot floors are exposed on the first floor between the existing concrete structure and new services.
“It’s a very utilitarian construction method, nothing particularly pretty, and not done in a loving way, but there’s a kind of honesty to it,” said project architect Jerome Wren. Inside, new Douglas Fir joists span perpendicular to the existing structure, introducing timber into the hybrid frame. The timber had originally been specified as double sections, but the contractor unexpectedly sourced solid core square beams. “We absolutely jumped at it,” said structural engineer Nina Heavyside from Davies Maguire. “It’s like an old oak beam—it cracks, and that’s part of its behavior. Moisture control is difficult, but this kind of movement is designed in.”
In the new floors, the simplicity of the new steel and Douglas Fir gives a more contemporary feel—a gradual shift that reflects the building’s transformation, floor by floor, from industrial relic to considered retrofit. A continuous ribbon of windows slide between galvanized fins on the new floors, framing horizontal panoramas impossible before on two sides, and on a third in obscured glazing to allow light in and prevent overlooking of the adjoining neighbor. From desks you look east—across a scatter of chimney-pots, signal gantries, and rattling Overground trains—at a moving diorama of London industry old and new, its textures echoed in the silvery spangle outside. At night, the glazing glows, turning former storage floors into a lantern. There is a resilience to this aesthetic: The finishes are exposed, raw, and exactly what they need to be—nothing hidden, nothing wasted.
Ellen Peirson is a London-based writer, editor, and designer.
