The scheme, for developer Compound Real Estate, is for a site on the A100, Great North Road in New Barnet. The council approved the designs under delegated powers last week.
The Hackney practice’s Meadow Works scheme will comprise storage facilities alongside collaborative workspaces, spaces for emerging small businesses and community facilities in a light industrial structure, which features anodised aluminium fins and ‘off-the-peg’ corrugated panels.
It also provides a new home for the locally popular Hole in the Wall café.
Gibson Thornley said its design was a new typology for self-storage buildings, and that its height and rhythm mirrored the surrounding housing.
Its metallic and precast concrete structure was inspired by early High-Tech sheds designed by Richard Rogers, Norman Foster and Nicholas Grimshaw, practice director Matt Thornley told the AJ last year for a news feature on the self storage revolution.
When the scheme was submitted last year, Thornley said it had been designed to challenge traditional self-storage facilities, which are often located on the outskirts of town and city centres and tend to be unsympathetic to surrounding architecture.
In the case of Meadow Works, Thornley said the design ‘repairs the street frontage’ on the Great North Road, while offering a building that is domestic in scale and feel.
Thornley added: ‘Our design for Meadow Works is shaped by a clear ambition to repair and reframe this important site in New Barnet. By introducing a civic quality building with active ground floor uses and generous landscaping, we’ve sought to create a place that feels welcoming, safe and enduring — an ‘artful shed’ that both supports local businesses and contributes positively to the everyday life of the community.’
The scheme is just the latest in a series of next-generation self-storage schemes being delivered by Compound, an SME developer which secured planning at the start of the year on Architecture 00-designs for a similar scheme in Peckham, south London.
Southwark Council approved the five-storey Peckham proposal in January. The building also provides co-working spaces on the ground floor, offering passive surveillance to an unsupervised pedestrian path leading to nearby homes.
Speaking to the AJ last summer, Architecture 00’s Lynton Pepper said the materiality of the Peckham scheme matched that of its standout neighbour, a Peter Barber Architects housing scheme with a ‘distinctive tall, stepped massing’.
In response, the storage unit’s façade has a brick texture and ‘syncopated rhythm’ of a warm – and, importantly, non-industrial – colour palette. It should invite you in, Pepper added.
Compound principal Jo Winter said: ‘We’re delighted to have secured planning for Meadow Works. The scheme demonstrates that well-designed self-storage can be a positive, low-impact urban use, combining strong architectural quality with real community benefit.
‘By reusing a constrained site efficiently, Meadow Works will support local residents and businesses while improving the streetscape and long-term function of the area.’
Architecture 00’s proposal for a storage facility in Peckham, south London, includes planted decks to provide a ‘human scale’