Along the south of the River Thames lies the historic town centre of Old Woolwich. The area, once a compact, dense urban core, bustling with activity and industry, is now dominated by a leisure centre that restricts access to the waterfront. The heritage of the site is not at all reflected in its current state and all that remains of the area’s built history is the 1912 Woolwich Foot Tunnel Entrance, tucked away behind the leisure centre.
For my design, I wanted to reinforce the site’s important relationship with the river Thames, as well as reintroduce elements of its industrial heritage. I resolved to re-establish the original access path to the Woolwich Foot Tunnel as well as preserve the historic side streets in order to recover the organic, multi-functional spaces that used to define the area. The functions of the proposed buildings, including a maritime museum incorporating shipbuilding techniques and a glass and pottery workshop, are indicative of the trades and crafts once found on the site. I retained the existing steel trusses of the leisure centre to consolidate my new design proposal beneath.
My design does not attempt to reconstruct a memory but, instead, hopes to provoke remembrance in a place where relating to the past has only continued to become increasingly difficult; not only for the present of Woolwich, but for its future, as the past becomes ever more distant and memories fade.
“Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects; history binds itself… to temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things.”