Wellington Estate community centre, nicknamed 'the Canal Club', was designed in the early 80's by Iraqi-Jewish architect Julian Sofaer. Sofaer did dozens of commissions for the London County Council and Greater London Council during the rebuilding of postwar London. Many of these commissions were school and community buildings like ours, and Wellington residents remember being taken to visit such buildings and chose their centre's style before Sofaer was commissioned.

Sofaer was a highly principled architect, obsessed by form and detail and the artistic disciplines of music and the Florentine Renaissance, and working within a life enhancing and humanist perspective. The modest building opens like a cathedral inside, and its roof is subtly sloped in many directions such that it never casts shadow onto the canal or her watery residents.

In its early days, the Canal Club was a fully functioning community centre, serving even as a laundry and wedding venue. In the 2000's, it started housing a playgroup, and eventually was let to a private playgroup. While the council was curbing the community's access to the building itself, they allowed a community of boaters to moor alongside it, given they open and run a public garden, nestled between the Canal Club, its basketball court, and the canal itself.

Today, even the private playgroup has been moved to another building, while the council plan to demolish and redevelop Sofaer's community centre. The community garden is what the estate have left to convene in regardless of weather, and from here, we share dreams of saving the building, her garden, the canalside biodiversity they foster and the emissions cost in redeveloping.