Assemble Converts a Pair of 1930s Dairy Warehouses in Dagenham into a Church and Community Centre

On Valence Avenue in Dagenham, Assemble has turned former United Dairies warehouses into a shared home for LifeLine Church and the charity Community Resources. The buildings date from the 1930s and grew out of the Becontree Estate, the vast council housing project that followed the 1919 Addison Act. Since then they have served as a furniture warehouse and as shops. The finished project covers 625 m² and was developed with Simple Works. It now gathers a congregation and a set of community programmes that had been scattered across a school hall, an old community centre, a retail unit, a former printers' workshop and a small office block.

The most important decision came before any drawing. The client originally planned to demolish and rebuild. Assemble's first move was to keep the masonry, the steel trusses and the timber roofs, which avoided the embodied carbon of a new build. That makes LifeLine a useful test case. It asks how much a modest charity building can gain from repair rather than replacement, and it answers with a building that looks confident about its own history without becoming precious about it.

A Street Front That Keeps Its Name

The brick arches and the painted "United Dairies" lettering have been repaired and kept, not scraped off. Retaining a former tenant's name might seem a strange choice for a church. Here it reads as a sensible acknowledgement that the building belongs to the estate's civic memory as much as to its new occupants.

New interventions at street level are light. Red railings and sliding glass doors set inside the old arch make the entrance read as open rather than fortified, which matters for a building that needs to welcome toddlers, teenagers and older residents throughout the week. The colour of the railings also ties the exterior to the trusses inside, a small move that signals what is waiting beyond the door.

The Clear-Span Hall as Civic Room

The large warehouse is the core of the scheme: a clear-span hall carried by wide steel trusses, now painted red and fully exposed. Assemble has not hidden the structure behind a suspended ceiling. Instead, globe pendants hang between the trusses and timber panels line the soffit, so the roof structure becomes the main decorative element of the room.

Plywood-lined walls finish the lower zone, giving the room a hard-wearing surface that can take pushchairs, wheelchairs and stacked furniture. That robustness is central to the project. A hall that hosts Sunday worship, playgroups and lunches in the same week cannot be fussy, and this one is visibly built to be knocked about.

One Room, Many Programmes

Photographs of a long communal table and a table tennis game under the same rooflit trusses show what consolidation actually means. Activities that used to need five addresses now share one floor, and the room shifts character with the furniture rather than with partitions.

The large screen and hanging speakers suggest the hall handles amplified worship and youth events as easily as quiet group work. We think this flexibility deserves more credit than it usually gets. Plenty of community buildings promise adaptability and deliver an awkward multipurpose box. This one gets its adaptability from generous volume and daylight, not from mechanical tricks.

Smaller Rooms and a Rear Courtyard

The smaller warehouses, with their timber roofs, take on more domestic roles. In one, an arched window sits above a cushioned bench among wooden shelving and a toy stall. In another, a pitched timber-panel ceiling is framed by yellow steel columns, where adults gather to listen to a speaker. These rooms are lower and more intimate, a useful counterweight to the main hall.

Behind the buildings, yellow brick walls enclose a courtyard where children play on grass while adults talk on the paving. For a site squeezed between neighbouring plots, this outdoor room is valuable. It gives playgroups somewhere safe to spill out, and it lets the old masonry act as a sheltering boundary rather than just a facade.

Inside the thick walls, a breathable wood-fibre insulation build-up finished with lime plaster improves thermal performance without trapping moisture in the 1930s brickwork. This is the less visible part of the project, but it determines whether the retrofit will last. Getting it wrong would quietly damage the fabric that the whole scheme sets out to protect.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan shows how long and narrow the footprint is, with the main hall marked by a crossed-diagonal roof outline between neighbouring plots. The long section sets a low pitched-roof wing against the taller hall, with four ventilation stacks rising above rows of tall bays. The cross sections and the detailed section through a brick-walled volume, with its triangulated timber truss and central ridge vent, show that the strategy relies on the existing roof forms rather than adding new ones.

Why This Project Matters

LifeLine shows how a demolition brief can be turned into a retrofit brief, and how a charity can end up with a better building as a result. The carbon argument is clear. The social argument is just as strong: putting worship, childcare, language classes, a café and a youth club under one roof creates the kind of daily overlap that a scattered set of rented rooms never could.

It also matters where this happens. Becontree was a landmark of state-led housing, and its supporting buildings are easy to dismiss as ordinary sheds. By repairing the arches, keeping the sign and exposing the trusses, Assemble treats this fabric as part of the estate's heritage. Other councils and congregations sitting on similar inter-war warehouses should look closely at this approach.

LifeLine Community Centre by Assemble, developed with Simple Works. Dagenham, East London, United Kingdom. 625 m², completed 2026. Photography by Jim Stephenson.

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