Riverside Mill
A Victorian grain mill, empty for nineteen years, brought back as eleven workspaces above a ground floor that belongs to the street.
- Completed
- 2025
- Area
- 1,840 m²
- Status
- Grade II listed
- Role
- Architect, lead consultant
The brief
The mill had been empty since 2006. Two previous schemes had proposed demolishing everything behind the front wall and building flats. Both were refused, and rightly.
Our client wanted workspace, and wanted the building to stay a building rather than become a façade. That ruled out the obvious approach and made the structure the starting point instead of an obstacle.
What we did
We repaired the existing timber frame where it could be repaired and replaced it in kind where it could not, keeping the original floor-to-ceiling heights that made the building worth saving.
Everything new is unmistakably new: a glazed stair and lift tower on the eastern flank, in a darker steel, set back so that the original elevation reads uninterrupted from the towpath.
The ground floor was given back to the street as a café and a workshop that the building's tenants and the neighbourhood share.
They spent a whole morning in the empty mill before drawing anything. That patience is the reason the building works as well as it does.