Jan Kattein Architects Turns Derelict Edmonton Garages into 35 Affordable Workspaces

A row of derelict garages on the Joyce and Snell's estates in Angel Edmonton is not the typical site for an architecture story. Notorious for crime and antisocial behaviour, wedged between 1960s residential blocks in one of the lowest-income wards in England, the site was awaiting a comprehensive estate regeneration that could take years to materialize. Jan Kattein Architects saw this waiting period not as dead time but as an opportunity: a meanwhile development with a five-year lease and a ten-year design life that converts the existing garage shells into 35 affordable workspaces and a community centre, all for a construction cost of just £1.4 million.

What makes Angel Yard genuinely worth examining is its refusal to treat 'temporary' as an excuse for cheapness or indifference. The project invests real architectural thought into a structure that may not survive the next decade. Barrel-vaulted timber roofs lift the ceiling height of each garage to create dignified, daylit rooms. Covered internal streets between the units generate a sheltered public realm that did not exist before. And the entire construction strategy, from site-fabricated curved plywood beams to corrugated galvanised steel bent against its profile, is calibrated to add as little embodied carbon as possible while remaining disassemblable and repurposable. Temporary here does not mean throwaway.

Keeping What Exists, Adding What Counts

The design begins from a principle of restraint. The existing brick garage walls stay. The floor slabs stay, avoiding the waste and accessibility problems that breaking them out would create. The blockwork separating walls stay, rough tolerances and all. What Jan Kattein adds is a lightweight timber frame sitting on discrete pad foundations in front of the existing walls, so the barrel vaults impose minimal load on structures that were built without foundations. From the street, the result is a legible dialogue: red brick base, vertical timber cladding above, and those distinctive corrugated steel arches catching the light.

The aerial view reveals how modestly the project sits within its context. Corrugated roofs with a central pyramidal skylight occupy the footprint of what was already there, surrounded by parking and estate blocks. No land grab, no grand gesture, just a careful intensification of an underused asset.

The Covered Streets

The most inventive spatial move is the pair of covered internal streets running between the garage-sized units. Sheltered by translucent canopies supported on exposed timber frames, these passages create an outdoor marketplace atmosphere where tenants can spill out, display work, and encounter each other without scheduling a meeting. One street connects through to Grove Street, a traffic-free road beside the local primary school, which means Angel Yard also provides a well-overlooked, safer route home for estate residents.

At dusk, the timber pergola structure and mesh fencing lend these walkways an honest, almost industrial character. There is no attempt to disguise the fact that this is a meanwhile project. The rawness feels appropriate: it signals that the spaces are available, adaptable, and not precious.

Inside the Vaults

Step inside and the plywood-lined barrel vaults transform the proportions of what were cramped, dark garages. The curved beams, each spanning 2.4 metres between walls, are fabricated from three layers of bonded 18mm plywood with joists sandwiched between them, a technique reminiscent of glulam but executed on site by cutting curves from plywood sheets and gluing them together. The 4mm bent plywood soffit finish creates a warm, continuous surface overhead, and pendant tube lights hang from it cleanly.

The interiors are simple but considered. Red rubber flooring, a copper splashback kitchenette, and generous glazed doors ensure each unit feels like a proper workplace rather than a storage container with aspirations. The double-height communal area, formed by merging four garages, houses a shared kitchen and WCs, reinforcing the cooperative ethos that Launch It's enterprise programmes depend on.

Material Honesty and Low-Carbon Logic

Details tell the story of the project's environmental strategy. Galvanised steel rainwater downpipes run exposed along timber columns, legible and maintainable. The blockwork walls of the original garages are left unfinished where they meet new plywood-lined interiors, and the junction between old and new is frank rather than fussed over. Rigid floor insulation sits below the plywood floor finish without disturbing the existing slab. Everything is designed for disassembly: timber, steel, plywood, all chosen because they can be repurposed when the lease expires.

The thermal performance is respectable for a temporary building: an airtightness of 3.5 m³/(h·m²) at 50 Pa and an area-weighted U-value of 0.29 W/m²K. Annual CO₂ emissions sit at 60.7 kgCO₂eq/m². At a construction cost of £2,500 per square metre, the project demonstrates that low-carbon, Part L-compliant workspace does not require a premium budget. It requires ingenuity.

Why This Project Matters

Meanwhile use projects often get filed under 'pop-up' and forgotten. Angel Yard resists that category. It deploys real structural thinking, a coherent material palette, and a spatial strategy that generates public benefit well beyond the sum of its individual units. The covered streets, the school connection, the public art commissions with Fisher Cheng marking routes to Fore Street: these are urban design decisions, not decorations. They demonstrate that short-term buildings can still produce long-term civic outcomes.

For architects working on regeneration in economically constrained contexts, Angel Yard offers a clear lesson. You do not need to demolish and rebuild to transform a place. You can retain existing fabric, add lightweight structure, and create workspaces that are affordable, thermally sound, and architecturally generous, all within a budget that a London borough can actually deliver. When the Joyce and Snell's Estate regeneration eventually arrives, the timber and steel of Angel Yard can be unbolted and reused elsewhere. That is not compromise. That is design.

Angel Yard, by Jan Kattein Architects. Angel Edmonton, London, United Kingdom. 1,218 m² (gross internal and external). Completed 2023. Structural engineer: engineersHRW. Contractor: Sullivan Brothers Construction. Photography by Jack Hobhouse.

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