A series of projects spanning 12 years transforms the South London Gallery (SLG) from a single building, almost a single gallery space, situated on the busy Peckham Road, into a thriving campus of buildings and gardens for showing art.

Founded in 1891, the original top-lit gallery is one of the finest art spaces in London. The gallery’s founding mission ‘to bring art to the people of south London’ has established deep roots with its local community in Peckham, one of the most ethnically diverse areas in the UK. These artistic and social agendas anchor the SLG’s architectural vision, which incorporates the original Victorian gallery, a derelict house, empty yards, the site of a destroyed lecture theatre and a former fire station across the road.

The adjacent derelict house at No 67 forms the armature for a café on the ground floor, exhibition spaces on the first floor and, on the second, a flat for an artist-in-residence. Staying true to the original plan, the domestic character is retained and folded back into the life of the gallery. A three-storey extension provides a double-height garden room for dining, events and art, linking the house to the main gallery and the new Fox Garden and Clore Education Studio.

Above it is the artists in residence kitchen and external terrace from where you can see the grassy roof of the Clore studio amongst the unruly neighbouring back gardens. Like the main gallery, the Clore is a generous single volume built into what remains of the old brick walls, within the footprint of the site’s original lecture theatre, destroyed after the Second World War. The lantern in the centre echoes the original gallery and provides abstracted views of the giant London plane tree in the neighbouring gardens. At night, walls and shutters close the whole building into a dark abstract box.

For talks and exhibition openings, pivoting walls create a continuous expanse, leading from the interior to the Gabriel Orozco Garden. With each new intervention the gallery is expanded and is quick to use or misuse each new addition, from garden to cafe to WC, whether internal or external, to show art. The Orozco garden is the art and this intervention takes the campus out of the back gate, through the adjacent prefabs and into the Sceaux estate where SLG has a long history of working with the residents.

The existing gallery building has been altered to face the garden and walls opened up with glazing to re-orientates the gallery towards what is now the new dedicated entrance from the Sceaux Estate with reading rooms, reception and direct access to galleries fox garden and cafe.

Materially, the project reprises the modest and varied landscape of brickwork, steel work and timber joinery that defines the backs of South London’s buildings. Bricks reclaimed from the former outhouses are used to make garden walls and paths in the Fox garden and derelict hillsides in the Orozco, while new buildings are timber-framed and clad in diagonally laid and variegated dark brown cement board. The timber structure remains visible in ceilings and occasionally emerges through the external envelope to form a studwork crown around the roof garden.

In the Orozco garden, York stone – traditionally used for London pavements and to be found at the front of the gallery – is abstracted from its civic use and cut to brick dimensions, the single unit is arranged in a grid of circles, a topographic textile laid out on the radius of the Clore Studio doors. Landscaping was developed with the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew to grow between the stones. In time the geometry will evolve into a rambling and overgrown scene of different grasses, low-level creepers and plants describing external rooms full of possibilities. A south London ruin where rain water is caught in fleeting circular puddles and fills wells and ponds.

The campus has also crossed the Peckham Road where the conversion of the earliest surviving example of a purpose-built fire station in London will extend the SLG’s social and artistic programme through its addition of galleries, archive spaces and a refectory. Constructed in 1867, the original building housed horse-drawn fire engines and a rear stable before it was converted into the factory and offices for Kennedy’s Sausages.

The next stage, opening in 2018, brings the changing history of these spaces into view – a stair rises in the passage between station and stable. A floor of carved cobbles forms a new entrance mat leading out to the city beyond.

Architects: 6a architects
Refurbishment, extension and new education building 2010
Structural Engineer: Jane Wernick Associates
Services Engineer: Serge Lai Engineers Ltd
Landscape Designer: Fraser & Morris Garden Design
Contractor: John Perkins Projects

Orozco Garden 2016
Artist Gabriel Orozco
Planting Scheme: Richard Wilford at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
General Contractor: Gardenlink

Fire Station 2018
Structural Engineer: Eckersley O’Callaghan
Services Engineer: Serge Lai Engineers Ltd
General Contractor: Lengard
Landscape Designer: Fraser & Morris Garden Design