ABOUT
Unit 38 is named after our first office above a nail salon – ‘Pretty Nails’ – inside Seven Sisters Indoor Market at Wards Corner, Tottenham. We initially found each-other through a shared frustration with models of ‘regeneration’ now typical across British cities, which often dispossess communities only to accelerate the housing crisis.
In 2018, we began collaborating with the traders to prepare the ‘Wards Corner Community Plan’ to prevent the market, a vital cultural hub for working class migrants, being demolished to make way for luxury flats by one of Britain’s largest developers. In 2021 we achieved a significant victory, pressuring the developer to officially withdraw from the site. The landowners (Transport for London) and local authority (Haringey Council) are now committed to a community-led future for the site.
We are a workers’ cooperative focused on community-led developments operating at the intersection of low-carbon architecture, democratic ownership, economic policy and political action. We have worked on a range of community planning projects across the country which emphasise retrofitting, cooperative ownership and community wealth building.
We want to offer design services to working class communities who are typically excluded from processes of urban change – ranging from migrants and refugees to low-income groups threatened with displacement from their neighbourhoods. While we don’t think architecture alone can address wider issues of societal inequality, it can demonstrate viable alternative futures, which in turn can enable new political, economic and ecological possibilities. Consequently, we strive for a multi-disciplinary approach which enables communities and social movements to realise their own ambitions for neighbourhood change, through directly taking charge of the development process.
Approach
From our foundation, our approach to every project has been necessarily flexible - we adapt what we do and the way we work to reflect the specific needs of communities, collaborators and the neighbourhoods we live in. The services we provide can therefore vary quite radically from one project to another, though they generally fall under five ‘themes’:
architectural design and planning;
Retrofit and passivhaus
securing a site and space;
research, strategy and policy;
community organising and advocacy;
We often find that a project necessitates more than one of these strands of work, requiring a holistic and multidisciplinary approach. We try to create opportunities within each project to meaningfully collaborate and exchange knowledge - we recognise that both the communities we work with (our ‘clients’) and ourselves (the ‘consultant’) can bring something to the table, be it lived or technical experience, ideas and perspectives, or new opportunities to learn from one another.
