Zhengxiao Wang

Camden Town is located on the northwest side of London, a fashionable and characterful place along the Regent’s Canal. Because of its open and welcoming community environment, Camden Town attracts a diverse group of people. Due to the impact of the pandemic fewer people come and the area has suffered commercially with many shops and restaurants permanently closed. This project asks: how do we reactive Camden Town in the post-epidemic era?

Residents in Camden Town have great enthusiasm for gardening and growing their own fruit and vegetables. Data shows that more than 900 people in Camden Town are on the waiting list for an allotment, but space is limited. In order to solve this problem, I plan to use the space of the canal. By recycling abandoned canal barges and replacing the middle seating area with a planted garden, they can become floating allotments. Barges can be linked together to form a larger shared planting space so that more people can be involved.

My site is the Interchange Warehouse at Camden Lock. This huge Victorian/Edwardian building in red brick framed with blue engineering brick has a rigorous architectural structure and plenty of delicate details.

A unique feature of the Interchange building is a basin that leads directly from the canal to the basement of the warehouse. This was once used for delivering coal and other materials and goods by horse-drawn barge, to be transferred to road or rail. Today the basin is used to take rubbish from Camden Lock to recycling on barges that enter beneath the building.

My proposal is that Camden’s keen gardeners dock their floating allotments in the basin where they can access plants and seeds, and contribute their own botanicals and produce to the gin distillery on the ground floor.

Inside the former Interchange, the building is a gin distillery park. The double-height ground floor hosts a distillery producing Canalside Gin, which is linked to a garden by a ramp, inspired by the pipes and stills of the distillery. As the ramp curves around the space, it provides visitors with the opportunity to walk freely in the double-height space. With the change of level and dynamic movement, visitors will experience a range of sounds, smells, and sights that will create vivid memories of their experience.

Originally the Interchange building would have been open at ground level so that goods could be loaded into delivery bays from rail and road. In recent decades the bays have been closed as the building has been turned into offices. In order to reopen the expansive ground floor, and connect it with the outside, I propose removing doors and panels and introducing natural light into the interior so that the plants can flourish. Both the interior and the external public spaces are filled with aromatic herbs and fruit trees which contribute to the making of gin and create a continuous green open space.

From the ramp, visitors have the opportunity to watch the process of gin distillation close-up and take in the aroma of gin and aromatic plants. The ramp also connects different parts of the production process: preparation is done in the basement, including the collecting and sorting of raw materials. Distilling and packing will be placed on the ground floor with special equipment. The final product - Canalside Gin – is being sold in bars located in three corners of the ground floor.