Flaxyard Social Housing and Cafe

These buildings for Southwark Council are at the back and to the north of Peckham High Street, forming a loose courtyard with the High Street and including a new café on one of its corners. We wanted the homes to have some of the individual qualities of the low-rise housing towards Burgess Park and designed what the client referred to as an ‘eccentric access arrangement’. Each home has a front and a back door — the front door is off a central core, the back door along a communal balcony facing the courtyard. The scheme is seen as an exemplar by the Council as it delivers 75% affordable homes. The roughened brick base of the building echoes the rugged and distinctive communal landscape which recycles and repurposes the existing materials and artefacts of the space into a new kind of archaeological garden.