Dept W

Mile End Road is one of the main arteries into the City of London, connecting it with the post-Olympic suburb of Stratford six kilometres to the east via the communities of Whitechapel, Stepney and Mile End. In the late 1920s, the Wickham family planned a large department store on a plot on the northern side of the road. Aspiring to be the ‘Harrods of the East’, it was to be a grand, Beaux Arts-style building with an impressive colonnade to the front and a central clock tower. To realise their grand design, the Wickhams were relying on a series of smaller businesses along that particular stretch to relocate elsewhere. However, just one shopowner – a jeweller named Spiegelhalter – refused to move premises. The Wickhams, hoping that they may eventually be able to buy the holdout unit, built their new emporium (with the clock tower slightly off–centre) around the Spiegelhalter shop, which stubbornly continued to trade as the store opened to either side. This ‘missing tooth’ in the neo-classical façade became a local landmark, the Spiegelhalter business eventually surviving Wickham’s highly respected department store by almost twenty years. When Wickham’s closed in 1965, the building was divided up into smaller units By the time that we were appointed to work on the project in it had been returned to a single ownership, but the piecemeal nature of the structure behind the somewhat precarious original façade was badly in need of rationalisation. The clients, realising that this city fringe neighbourhood would attract renewed interest with the opening of the Elizabeth Line station at Whitechapel, wanted us to return the Wickham’s building to its former grandeur, reworking the space to suit a mixture of uses including offices on the upper floors and shops and leisure facilities at street level. Like many in the local and extended community, we loved the David and Goliath story of Spiegelhalter and the Wickhams, and were reluctant to fill the gap in the facade. Instead, we recognised it as an opportunity to celebrate the history of the building by retaining the holdout unit, making this the new heart and soul of the building rather than the thorn in its side. The Spiegelhalter shop is now the entrance through which all of the users pass on their way to the reception and core space behind. The original hanging façade, retained with a ghost of the original signage in the render, acts as both a relic of the building’s past and a signpost on the Mile End Road Inside, the upper levels of the building have been remodelled and unified into large, flexible workspaces. We kept the shell and core fit-out of these very simple, a background onto which the new tenants can project their own identities. As many of the original features have been retained as possible, this ‘under-designed’ approach allowing the fabric of the building itself to be the main story. Taking advantage of the piecemeal nature of the existing space, we also introduced a number of outside terraces. At ground level, the existing retail tenants have retained their units, with the awnings and fascias above rationalised to unify the grand front elevation.