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Hackney New School

Architects Henley Halebrown designed in London the Hackney New School, a schooling complex planned around a central play space and featuring different buildings faced in brick.

Hackney New School is a mixed-ability Free School with a focus on music, combining a 500-pupil secondary school and 200-pupil sixth form. The site, in a conservation area next to the Regent’s Canal Kingsland Basin, is tight. L-shaped, it combines a disused builders yard – formerly Union Wharf with the Wharf Master’s House intact – and a Post War telephone exchange. The 5,500 sqm scheme is planned around a central ball court and play space.

The new warehouse (Canal building) presents a squarish elevation, but with asymmetric haunches, to both basin and the schoolyard. The profile of the southern haunch opens up views of the brick gable wall and zigzag roofline of the next-door grade II listed warehouse. The northern end is marked by a brick chimney and opens up glimpses of the canal basin through the bridges that span between this and the telephone exchange.

The tower (Kingsland Building) is altogether different. The street facade is a tripartite composition. An existing shopfront forms the plinth, above a new precast concrete screen marks the piano nobile, on top of which there is a 3-storey blind brick mass punctured by just one window.

All four buildings are faced in brick. Copings and a number of other details are precast concrete. Windows are powdered coated (ivory, red oxide, salmon pink and dark brown) aluminium and timber composite. Anodised aluminium-faced canopies mark entrances to each building. For the new buildings the contractor selected a steel frame for speed of erection.