Digest #10 – Sutton on the up: raised by Sam Chisholm, Takero Shimazaki, BDP and Ab Rogers

Tuesday 15th April. We head down, way down, to Zone 5 to see the birth of a new wellness-focused co-working space and new cancer care facilities…

I grew up in a place called Sutton, a place you’d be forgiven for not knowing where it is. “If you think of London as a clockface, it’s at 6pm,” my Dad used to say, safely describing only its location in abstract terms. 6pm, rock bottom.

To give that metaphor a some more meaningful geographical context, Sutton exists in the nether-zone between Croydon, Epsom and Wimbledon. Not as edgy as the former, not as sporty as the other, and not as posh as the latter. Even the Tram which connects Croydon to Wimbledon – and which is easily the coolest thing this far down in South London – misses Sutton, instead taking a more direct route through a sewage works and landfill site.

The pandemic wasn’t kind to Sutton either and its High Street bears the scars. The St. Nicholas Shopping Centre, billed in 1992 when it opened (to the tune of £100m) as a “premier” retail space for the South East, is due to be demolished after the council recently bought it for £26m. Sutton Council estimates that in the past ten years, roughly 120,000 square metres of offices has been lost, reducing the total office floorspace in the borough by around a third.

The borough was one of only five London boroughs to vote for Brexit; the average (median) age is 39 years, four years older than Greater London which has an average age of 35. (The median age for the UK, incidentally, is 40). According to the most recent census, 25–34-year-olds only make up 13% of Sutton’s population compared to 18% per cent for London.

So how to make this place attractive to young(ish) people?

Hope comes in the form of Oru, a co-working wellness space that offers desks and offices for new businesses.

Remarkably, it’s a success. I’ve been a few times now and it’s reliably busy – in a good way. Oru started life in Dulwich – one of the most lah-dee-dah places this side of the Thames – and has expanded on its offering in Sutton. At both locations is Trinco, a genuinely fantastic Tamil Sri-Lankan café that arguably deserves more attention than it currently gets. (Surely it’s only a matter of time before an influencer finds it, I suspect).

Architecturally, Oru Sutton is worthy of attention too. Sam Chisholm and Takero Shimazaki, guided by Oru Co-founders Paul and Vib, have reworked a gutted BHS to produce a little pocket of Shoreditch in Zone 5. A more in-depth take on all that can be found in my piece for Architecture Today, which includes further plans for a wellness spa from Hassell.

Over time Oru won’t just appeal to those on the younger side of Sutton’s 39 median age. Its wellness facilities will likely, I suspect, be used during the working day by those who are older with more time on their hands or those having a break from the kids.

On a more macabre note, Sutton does, as it happens, offer some architectural delight in the form of healthcare – a genre for which buildings are very seldom architectural show stoppers.

But that’s not the case at Royal Marsden’s site in Belmont. In 1963, Queen Elizabeth II opened the East Wing of the specialist cancer facility in what was her only visit to the borough. Since then, BDP has designed the Oak Cancer Centre which opened a few years ago. Simon Allford reviewed the building for AT – a write-up which is perhaps as good as, if not better than the building itself. The article starts as follows:

It was an inauspicious start. I arrived at a sea of car parking, at what I thought was a front door to the large and sprawling web of machine-like mechanisms – wrapped, almost apologetically, in dreary skins – that pertain to be architecture. My taxi driver asked if we were near an entrance. The member of staff asked if I was well enough to walk. Having explained I wasn’t a patient, I was directed to a well-concealed door that led to the children’s cancer ward. And so I found my way to the architects and client who were waiting to receive me in the light-filled and surprisingly buzzing lobby of the Oak Cancer Centre.

You can read the full article here.

And we’re not quite done yet. Sticking with the Marsden, Ab Rogers (son of Richard) has designed a strikingly red a Maggie’s cancer care centre.

Both buildings are worth going to see; the Maggie’s especially, as it’s easily one of the better Maggie’s out there.

Read Olly Wainwright’s review of the Sutton Maggie’s Centre here.