An evening at the Department Store in Brixton

What Squire & Partners' Brixton home says about reuse, honest materials, and handing a building back to its neighbourhood.

I went along to a London Society drinks evening recently with Joseph Fairbairn, who has just joined the studio, as well as Max McDonagh of AKT II and we spent it in one of the more thoughtful buildings in London: the Department Store in Brixton, Squire & Partners' home. Henry Squire, a director of the practice and the son of its founder Michael Squire, talked us through how the building came to be what it is. It stayed with me. Beautifully made, clearly argued, and quietly generous in a way that's rarer than it should be.

RISE's Sean Ronnie Hill and Joseph Fairbairn at the Department Store, beneath the oak-framed rooftop and glazed rooflight. RISE Design Studio.

The London Society

The evening was hosted by the London Society, and its chair, Leanne Tritton, opened with a short history of it that was worth hearing. The Society was founded in 1912 by a group of Londoners worried that the city was growing with no real vision behind it, and its purpose then was much as it is now: to get people thinking seriously about London and arguing well about how it should change. Its early members included Edwin Lutyens, Raymond Unwin and Aston Webb, and a few ideas we now take for granted began in its pages. The green belt is one, set out in the Society's 1921 collection London of the Future, alongside some that thankfully never happened, including a proposal to put an airport on top of Hyde Park. More than a century on it still does the same job, through lectures, debates, walks and its journal, keeping a serious and independent conversation about the city going. Tritton, who chairs it and who founded the architecture and planning communications agency ING Media, made the case for why that conversation still matters. Standing in a building like the Department Store, it wasn't a hard case to make.

A London Society evening in the rooftop pavilion at the Department Store, with chair Leanne Tritton speaking beneath the green-oak frame and glazed dome. RISE Design Studio.

How the Bon Marché came to Brixton

The building's story starts with a piece of luck. In 1876 a local businessman, James Smith, won a small fortune, somewhere around £80,000, when his racehorse Rosebery took both halves of the autumn double at Newmarket. Smith had seen the Bon Marché in Paris, the grand department store that more or less invented the idea, and set out to build his own version in Brixton, named after it. The result was Britain's first purpose-built department store, and one of the first steel-framed buildings in the country, put up when Brixton was a flourishing destination for shopping and culture. In 1906 a furnishings annexe was added on Ferndale Road, later known as Toplin House, and it is that annexe, not the original store, that Squire & Partners eventually made their home.

Reading the building

Squire & Partners bought the building derelict in 2015 and moved in two years later. Rather than gut it, they stripped away the later partitions, carpets and false ceilings and revealed what was underneath: original brickwork, marble, terracotta, teak parquet, Crittall windows, cast-iron radiators, even the graffiti left by the squatters who had been there before them. They kept the beauty in its decay instead of scrubbing it out.

What I found most satisfying was the logic they applied to the new work. Everything they have added sits in one consistent palette: light timber, black, and a bronzy gold, carried right through to the smallest details, down to the cabling. Anything not in those materials was there already. So you can read the building as you move through it. New floor, light timber and black. Original feature, left as found. It is an honest piece of wayfinding, and it does something I admire: it tells the truth about the building's age and its layers, rather than papering over the join between old and new.

A building that lets people in

The part of the talk that landed hardest was about Brixton, and the choice not to wall the building off. Brixton has been through the long argument about gentrification that so much of London is having, and the easy thing for an incoming practice would have been speed gates, a security desk and a sealed front door. They went the other way. A department store, the point was, is a public building, and they wanted to share as much of it as they could with the area around it.

You can see that in how they handled the ground floor. They curated the street frontage deliberately, for the neighbourhood rather than the highest bidder. When a national chain offered good money for one of the units, they turned it down on the grounds that it was not Brixton, and worked with local people to find a business that fitted instead. They kept the community post office that had been there, rebuilding it a smaller space at the back to its own brief. And when Pure Vinyl, a record shop with roots in Brixton's music scene, was being pushed out of its previous home, they simply invited it in.

The same generosity runs through the rest of the building. The lower-ground event space works as something like a village hall: lent for almost nothing to local residents' groups who need somewhere to meet, including to meet the council, while institutions that can well afford it pay a proper rate. It holds pop-up markets, yoga, exhibitions. And the members' club upstairs is deliberately low-barrier: a name, a phone number, a photograph and a small monthly fee, with a preference for people who actually live nearby. It is a members' club designed to let locals in, not to keep them out.

Why it stayed with me

I came away thinking about how much of this overlaps with what we care about at RISE, even though the project is a world away in scale from most of our work. Reusing a derelict building rather than demolishing it is the single biggest thing you can do for embodied carbon. Being honest about materials, letting old and new each read as what they are, is something we try to do in our own retrofits. And the idea that a building should earn its place on the street, not just occupy it, is one we keep returning to.

It is easy to talk about architecture serving a community. It is harder to turn down the money, keep the post office, and hand your best event space to the local residents' association for nothing. That is the genuinely difficult part, and it is what makes the Department Store more than a handsome restoration.

If you ever get the chance to go on one of their tours, take it. And if you are thinking about a project where an old building could be brought back rather than replaced, we'd be glad to talk it through.

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