Building Study: South London Gallery, by 6a architects

Believe it or not but there was once a time when London had more fire stations that art galleries. Originally built in 1867, the former Camberwell Fire Station is the earliest surviving purpose-built fire station in the capital. In the two years after its completion, a further 26 stations were built, all following Camberwell’s model to help form what we now know as the London Fire Brigade. 

Yet at the same time London could only boast a handful of dedicated art galleries, the nearby Dulwich Picture Gallery and the National Gallery being among the few. 

Unlikely as it may sound, fire stations and art galleries share a number of similarities. Both have a clear civic purpose. Both present a communal concentration of a specialised skill set. And both seek to bring something to the people, whether it be safety or enlightenment. As the Victorian philanthropist and gallery founder William Rossiter himself described the South London Gallery when he opened it in its current location in 1891, “Its intention is to bring art to the people of south London.”

It is this unlikely connection between two very types of public building that has been celebrated this week in the completion of the conversion of Camberwell Fire Station into the South London Gallery’s new £4m home. The gallery has been designed by 6a architects and it sees the dilapidated former fire station, which was placed on the English Heritage ‘At Risk’ register in 2014, transformed into a contemporary art space. 

It is the latest instalment of 6a’s decade-long involvement with the gallery. In 2010 its extension to the gallery’s main building opened, located just across the road from the fire station. Since 1891 the gallery has been housed in a florid red-brick and stone dressed late-Victorian pile. The 2010 project saw gallery space doubled by an extension into a neighbouring Victorian terrace. As well as additional gallery space, the scheme provided a cafe, education studio and living accommodation for a rolling programme of artists in residence. 

The latest project responds to an arguably more ambitious and challenging brief. The four-storey building had not been continuously occupied for years. Its role as a fire station ended in 1925 with the construction of the current fire station next door, and over the subsequent decades it was used for a variety of transient purposes including offices and a factory. But by the 2000s it had become derelict and abandoned and on first visiting the site four years ago gallery director Margot Heller recalls finding “every kind of rot you can imagine”.

Into this has now been inserted four floors of sleek exhibition space which includes four galleries, a ground-floor cafe, an attic studio, education space, communal kitchen, archive and dramatic entrance hall. The extra 425sq m of space provided doubles the gallery’s total size across its expanded two-building campus. 

From the very start of the project 6a has sought to retain as much of the building’s historic character as possible. Externally, this involved making virtually no changes to the front elevation, a charming and endearingly eclectic mid-Victorian assortment of striped brickwork, paired windows, tall chimneys and looming gable. Most nostalgically of all, a glass lantern inscribed with the word “engines” hangs from an elaborate projecting cast-iron bracket, in reality a faithful replica of the lost original reconstructed by careful reference to historic photographs. 

The design even deliberately neglected to clean the brickwork, deciding the original gault white brick would be too bright if washed. In fact, the only visual changes to the front have been the restored windows, the repair of the cobbled courtyard and the reinstatement of the ground-floor appliance doors through which the fire engines would once leave and enter the station. These now make a convenient duo of French doors that open out from the principal ground-floor gallery. 

If the exterior appears domestic in nature, it is because of the curious mix of functions originally housed inside, characteristics which the design once again seeks to maintain. When it was built, the fire station as a building type did not yet exist, so local architect Edward Cresy Jnr resorted to the reassuringly familiar aesthetic of residential rather than utilitarian architecture. 

This aesthetic also responded to the building’s internal use which, in the days before the modern shift system, required accommodation for the firemen, their families, the fire engines themselves, equipment and, most quixotically, horses. By 1911 27 people lived permanently in the building in 15 rooms. 

It is a unique architectural typology which, as 6a’s Steph Macdonald explains, informed the design response. “We have maintained the original layout of the rooms as far as possible to retain the sense of a big house with civic intentions, adjusting openings and circulation to bring long views and light through the new spaces.”

Accordingly, while practically all the internal spaces follow the contemporary art gallery white cube aesthetic, there are nuanced touches that reveal the building’s previous role. In what was once a deep external passageway for the engine horses to reach the stables at the back of the building, a double-height entrance hall has been created, complete with original external brick chevron floor pattern and central gutter on which the pattern converges. An exposed original brick wall separates the hall from the rest of the building. 

From the entrance space a white, perforated steel staircase swoops up the building, its surfaces bouncing natural light back into the building and the space itself generously lit by a new skylight and windows. The stair and entrance occupy one narrower side of the building while the gallery rooms fill the wider remaining portion of the plan, an arrangement familiar to thousands of terraced houses across London. 

Equally, the communal kitchen in which the families of the fire station staff would once gather and eat together has been converted into a sleek modern staff kitchen with rear roof terrace next door. And original timber and parquet flooring has been restored and only gently cleaned to retain as much of its former domestic character as possible. 

The galleries themselves again resemble rooms in houses, their paired windows and wood flooring softening the stark white background. Best of all is the studio built into the attic, the steep gables and exposed truss beams providing a garret-like feel that brims with character and intimacy. 

What 6a has in fact created here is two galleries. The first, as exemplified by the playful attic, is an ode to the building’s former use. It is represented by the sequence of timber floors, patchy exposed brickwork, hanging lanterns, wooden beams and retained residential layout that have all been carefully preserved and flow quietly through the converted building. 

The second gallery is its more whitewashed, streamlined contemporary twin. Here the language is a more clinical and precise dialect of steel staircases, concrete floors and lintels, white surfaces and glazed walls. While it is inevitably a colder and more manicured approach, the junctions between the two orthodoxies, particularly in the steel staircase slapped against the exposed brickwork wall, make for genuine moments of interest throughout the building. 

But what makes the new gallery work is that both approaches are unified in their adherence to the overriding theme of domesticity. And it is this retained and rejuvenated residential character that gives the new gallery its key architectural offer: the modest, voyeuristic thrill of not just looking at artwork but wandering through a private home.