Radical foundations in Bloomsbury

A sea of change is upon us and radical new foundations need to be grown. The time has come for the fundamental need for radical thought with respect to the new paradigms of architecture as we are confronted with political, social and technological disruptions. At stake is nothing less than the opportunity of world-making in which the role of the architect is paramount. Bloomsbury will be one of our sites of exploration, where in 1692, Thomas Slaughter founded Slaughter’s Coffee House in St. Martin’s Lane, which became the explosively productive haunt and home of artists, architects, designers, players of games, makers and wasters. This was the first of the many radical schools of art to be born within the anarchic lands of Seven Dials and Bloomsbury. The other site will be in Deptford, where for hundreds of years dangerous, infectious, exciting and foreign ideas had landed along its shore, ebbing and flowing with the tide, transforming the City of London. This article will showcase a series of design projects proposed by students of architecture at the Architectural Association and University of Greenwich in relation to sites in Bloomsbury and Deptford in London, respectively. Each contributor has developed a complex set of spatial interrelationships that define their practice and consider art as a spatial language that dissects contemporary society, an architecture that is pre-reflexive, through a radical spatial notational strategy, so as to re-engage with the presence of the past.