NLA Walking Tour – Shoreditch

Discover Shoreditch, London’s creative urban neighbourhood with an ever-changing supply of start-ups, independent cafes, underground clubs, event spaces and pop-up retail. This area of east London is undergoing unprecedented transformation through infrastructure, innovation and mixed-use development.

Shoreditch evolves onwards and upwards - accommodating major new schemes like Principal Place by Foster + Partners, the old High Street’s first residential tower that masks the lower-range offices for Amazon behind. The 100-year-old iconic Tea Building factory retrofitted by AHMM 20 years ago attracted a new generation of media and digital creatives, with warehouses knocked together and extended into more workshops, studios and boutique hotels by architects Duggan Morris, Witherford Watson Mann, Conran and Partners among others.

David Adjaye’s landmark visual arts gallery in Rivington Place confirmed the area’s serious credentials. Large-scale, 1960s retrofits like the expanded Ace Hotel by EPR and more recently Arnold House by Buckley Grey Yeoman enjoy extended new life on the main streets. The warehouse aesthetic is underlined by the Curtain Hotel pastiche by Dexter Moren, complete with a roof pool. Close by on Curtain Road is a mammoth-sized new residential and office development The Stage by Perkins+Will - so named for Shakespeare’s weighty associations with the area. New build, low-rise flexible workspaces like Frames by Squire and Partners and the Japanese-themed ‘fragmented’ Nobu Hotel by Ron Arad/Ben Adams, confirm the area’s new sophisticated status as it segues into the new configuration of Old Street Roundabout by Weston Williamson + Partners and overlooked by the large-scale retrofitted White Collar Factory and Bower schemes, both by AHMM.

This walk is led by performer, curator and tour guide, Mark T Cox.

Start: Shoreditch High Street Overground Station entrance
End: Old Street Station

Duration: 2 hours approx.

Host or Publisher New London Architecture