Studio Weave Builds a Maida Hill Public Toilet from Reclaimed City of London Office Granite

Public toilets rarely get architecture. They get budgets, vandal-proof fittings and, increasingly, closure notices. The British Toilet Association estimates that 40% of UK public toilets have shut since 2000. That makes Studio Weave's 17 m² pavilion in Maida Hill, North Paddington, worth paying attention to. It is a small cubic building with three step-free toilets, one of them wheelchair-accessible. It replaces an underground facility that was hard to reach and had become associated with antisocial behaviour.

What makes it interesting is the stone. The walls are pink Finnish granite and Norwegian larvikite, salvaged from the cladding of a demolished Broadgate office building in the City of London. On Broadgate the stone was a thin decorative skin hung from a steel frame. In Maida Hill it carries its own weight as load-bearing masonry. The studio calls this "deep reuse", and the phrase is earned. The material has not just been recycled. It has changed job, and it is detailed so that it can change job again.

A Patchwork That Admits Where It Came From

Most reuse projects try to make salvaged material look new, or else age it into rustic charm. Here the architects keep the original module sizes and finishes wherever possible. Polished faces sit next to split-face edges, and grey, pink and red slabs alternate in a pattern that comes from what was available rather than from a composition drawn in advance. Two round openings break up the street elevation and give a mute box a face.

The result reads as something between a garden folly and a geological sample. We think that ambiguity is the point. You can tell this stone has had another life, and the building does not apologise for it. Studio Weave describes it as "cost-efficient luxury": a material that would be unaffordable new, made available to a public that rarely gets offered polished granite at the corner of a market square.

Holding a Corner at Street Level

Moving the toilets from below ground to street level is the most consequential decision in the project, and it is an urban decision before it is an architectural one. The pavilion sits on a planted island at a busy junction, visible to cyclists, bus passengers and the street cleaner parked beside it. Being visible makes it safer, and an accessible building that everyone can see is much harder to neglect quietly.

The pavilion is the last phase of the Maida Hill Market improvements, which Westminster City Council funded with support from the Mayor of London's Good Growth Fund. Read in that light, it works as a marker as much as a facility. A dense stone block that is not flashy anchors a square otherwise defined by traffic signals and road markings.

Crevices, Boulders and an Existing Tree

The landscape, developed with Tom Massey Studio, extends the stone story into the ground. Crevice planting, including native sea thrift, grows among boulders that double as seating. This is the kind of planting that likes poor soil and harsh exposure, which suits a traffic island far better than ornamental beds that need constant care.

The team also kept an existing tree, and that decision does a lot of work. The tree softens the building's mass and filters views from the road, as when a red bus streaks past behind a screen of trunks. The pavilion reads as part of a small grove rather than an object dropped onto bare paving.

Doors, Benches and the Evening Square

On the service side, a row of pale doors is set back into the stone, giving each cubicle a direct, ground-level entrance. No corridor, no attendant's lobby, no descent. With string lights overhead and a bench alongside, the square gains a social edge as well as a utility. Divisare notes that seating is part of the brief, and the photographs show people using it as a place to pause rather than only somewhere to pass through.

Inside, the toilet unit stands free of the stone shell. This is a quiet but important detail. Plumbing and fittings wear out on a much shorter cycle than masonry, and here they can be replaced without disturbing the walls. Webb Yates engineered the self-supporting stone structure so that the slabs can later be taken apart for a third use.

Plans and Drawings

The location and site plans show how tightly the pavilion fits its curving road edge. The floor plan is compact: two WCs, an accessible WC, a service room and an electrical cabinet, all opening directly to the outside. The elevations are the most revealing drawings. They record every slab as an individual piece, closer to an inventory than a cladding pattern, which is exactly what a building designed for disassembly needs.

Why This Project Matters

The usual case for reuse is carbon, and it holds here. But the stronger argument this pavilion makes is about value. Stone that once dressed a City office lobby now serves a neighbourhood market square, carrying its own weight and its history in plain view. Turning a thin skin into structure is a more ambitious idea of reuse than crushing material into aggregate, and it shows that salvaged components can do more than they did the first time.

It also makes a case for public toilets as civic architecture at a time when they are disappearing. A step-free building at street level, designed to outlast its fittings and to be dismantled with care, treats a basic need with seriousness. If councils want reasons to build these again rather than close them, 17 m² of reclaimed granite in Maida Hill is a persuasive one.

Maida Hill Public Toilet by Studio Weave, Maida Hill, Paddington, London, United Kingdom. Area: 17 m². Completed: 2025. Landscape: Tom Massey Studio. Structural engineering: Webb Yates. Client: Westminster City Council. Photography: Lorenzo Zandri.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.