Down the depot

Creative types from graphic designers to Bollywood producers are snapping up studio space in a 1970s bus depot that is helping to kickstart the creation of a cultural quarter for Leicester.

The depot is not the most obvious choice for a creative hub. ‘It used to look like a huge public lavatory,’ explains Mike Candler of Leicester City Council, who is responsible for getting the new quarter off the ground. Will Alsop has been commissioned for the masterplan and Rafael Viñoly is designing a £31.75m performing arts centre, but Leicester Creative Business Depot is the first visible evidence of the scheme. London practice Ash Sakula’s 50 lively start-up studios are already attracting designers to the area.

Candler had worked with Ash Sakula on the nearby Sparkenhoe community theatre. When the £1.2m budget was slashed to £600,000, Ash Sakula suggested an inventive, cheap way of reusing the building, so he knew the architect could deliver. The practice was appointed in September 2002 and by December the project was in for planning and out to tender.

The four-storey depot has been totally stripped down and reclad. A new six-storey building, B, encloses one side of the yard, giving it a more intimate feel. The facades of both buildings are elegant and rather fun. They are a collage of Schuco curtain walling panels, stripped of cover plates and with a variety of interlayers: some have translucent insulation globules of plastic, others have been silk screened by artist Linda Schwab and some are left plain. It works surprisingly well even on the old building (now known as building A), where matching up the window openings and the background of the original white tiles complicated the job.

A soft red brick wraps along the main facade on Rutland Street, folded to follow the lines of the old bus garage and turned out at either end as if to show it is just a skin. The bricks break up the strip windows to create a more varied facade that sits happily with its grade-II-listed Victorian neighbours.

Entrances to the old depot building – one on the street and one to the courtyard – have been roughed up to give them texture. Steel, glass and brick gives way to black Astroturf, wooden frames and elm rough boarding. The main entrance on Rutland Street is flanked by two shopfront studios.

The entrance lobby, cut diagonally into the building to accommodate the original staircase, has a hairy black Astroturf wall on one side. On the other, elements of the original concrete structure are bush-hammered into reliefs and framed with smooth-faced shuttering ply in dark purple. Ash Sakula designed the entrance as a visual funnel to the courtyard beyond, but unfortunately visitors’ views are interrupted by graphics on the glass.

The entrance builds up a feeling of anticipation, but the cafe and reception beyond are not the best introduction to the building because both were hit by the savings made at the end of the design and build contract. The unfinished look is deliberate, with concrete left rough where it had to be sliced away, but the space lost some refinement. The lights are over-bright, the acoustics hard (the specified fabric ceiling treatment was never installed) and plaster was carelessly splattered over the cement fibreboard finish to the reception desk.

Still, the high ceilings of the ground floor give the cafe a lofty sociability that welcomesboth public and tenants. This is the hub of the building, where everyone passes through to pick up post, grab a coffee or have an informal meeting at one of the plentiful tables. In reception, there are pigeonholes for each studio which punch through the wall to appear as lightboxes on the public side. Next to the reception are hot desks for short-term tenants. In the summer the people can spill out into the courtyard, but for the moment a light installation by artist Tony Stallard on the depot’s old chimney gives an indication of activity inside: the louder the party the brighter the light.

Incongruous as it may seem, the bus drivers used to have a ballroom, and Ash Sakula has used the space to carve out a courtyard on the second and third floor of the depot. A funnel-like wooden barrel roof light projects into the terrace, where its Perspex top doubles as a table. Ash Sakula has an attachment to these outdoor rooms and has created another one on the new block as an adjunct to the top floor meeting rooms, complete with a bench and its own, unglazed, ‘window’.

In the old building the staircase’s original rectangular profile handrails and elegant dogleg with curved half landing have been retained. In the new block the galvanised steel staircase is strong and simple but the fun element has been overplayed: treads are covered with alternate black and brown layers of vinyl; services are highlighted in oxide red; and crinkly tin shines on one wall of the staircase before wrapping around to the outside of the building.

An eletricity substation had to be incorporated in the new building, so the lower floors are cantilevered. On the ground floor a gallery with its own entrance functions discretely from the rest of the circulation and the staircase to the studios and meeting rooms above. The gallery projects like a big bay window while a series of smaller, display-box windows set up a rhythm along the facade.

The studios themselves could have just been standard white boxes, but Ash Sakula has demonstrated the thinking that marks out its other work such as the Peabody flats in Silvertown (RIBAJ Nov 2004). Each space is marked on the outside by a vertical gold stripe (Schuco’s standard pressure cap) and contains all the ingredients for characterful colonisation. The glazed facade has shelves and /or a window seat of purple ply. On the plasterboard walls, panels of galvanised steel sheeting act as magnetised display areas. At the entrance to each studio a door covered in blackboard paint is framed by a 300mm deep ply box. A light incorporated in the frame allows the door to be used as an informal noticeboard. Inside the studio the void created houses the individual services and meters for each tenant.

Graphic designers have given tenants another chance to customise their entrance with orange Perspex boxes which can hold a small object to symbolise the work inside. So, boxes outside the toilets feature blue and pink loo rolls, while a mug denotes the kitchen space on each floor. Ash Sakula imagined the kitchens as little tea chests; they are most convincing in the new building where they are tucked into the corner of the corridor and fabricated primarily from ply. They have lower, more intimate ceilings than the studios and corridors, and a little window seat. It is communal but not too communal: each studio’s tea and coffee is kept in its own separate box.

This is an elegant piece of architecture, with none of makeshift edges that marred the exterior of the practice’s Silvertown flats, but all of the thoughtfulness that made them such desirable spaces.

Client Leicester City Council
Architect Ash Sakula
Structural engineer Diamond Wood
M&E EP Consulting