Yorkton Workshops has enabled Pearson Lloyd to consolidate its office, workshop and design archive onto a single site for the first time in five years. A new permanent home in the heart of Hackney for their industry-leading design office. Built and designed in collaboration with Cassion Castle Architects who also acted as contractor for the build.
Spanning five former stables-turned-workshops on Yorkton Street, Yorkton Workshops is set in an area with a long association with making and manufacture.
Today, most of the premises once occupied by furniture makers, musical-instrument artisans, wood turners and other craftspeople have been replaced with residential units. The restoration of Yorkton Workshops is thus an act of preservation, reinvigorating the area’s design heritage, and linking Pearson Lloyd to a lineage of making that dates back over a century.
When Pearson Lloyd acquired the building in 2017, it was a mess; a haphazard collision of old and new, with a mishmash of overlaid alterations and adaptations that had been made over the decades.
Pearson Lloyd considered the most sustainable, socially valuable and creatively interesting path was to work with the existing building – to preserve, enhance and adapt.
This determination to minimise environmental impact influenced the design approach from the outset. Choices were made to minimise the demolition needed, the potential landfill generated and the new materials introduced. They ensured existing materials were retained or reused wherever possible, repurposing bricks, steelwork and timber joists from the demolition phase, supplemented by materials sourced from reclamation yards wherever necessary.
The retrofit approach left Yorkton Workshops with a 43% predicted reduction on existing emissions, and 66% reduction in embodied carbon emissions in comparison to a new-build (timber) structure. (source Structural Workshops).
