LEAF Tea Shop

Moughland Lane

Beach

Bailey Street

Quarry Street

Former Cole Street School

Childwall Park Avenue

Bryn Eglwys

RARE Fashion School

Bluecoat School Library

RARE Dance School

Portland Street

Toll Bar Cottage

Bluecoat Gallery

Gwersyllt

Fairview

Bramble Livery

One Fine Day

The Plaza

Edward Pavillion

Carfax Basement

Cilcain Shop

York House

Liverpool ONE

1 St. Bride Street

42 Jamaica Street

42 Jamaica Street is an early C20 high-bay warehouse of masonry construction located in the Baltic Triangle district of Liverpool city centre. Formerly in use for bulk food storage, the premises were also home to an ice-cream van business before the most recent use as a drive-through car wash. Planning permission for conversion to comprise studio office spaces together with a street level café and a flexible studio/ light industrial unit has been granted.

The studio offices maximise the available volume within the existing building, providing a mix of duplex units at ground and first floor level. To the Brick Street elevation, the units have shop-style frontages, an urban gesture to link Jamaica Street with the complementary developments at Flint Street.

Anchored by the ‘common room’ café, the studio offices support the creative industry and start-up businesses thriving in the district. The rear unit is left as a shell for adaption by the future occupier, to support the pattern of flexible occupancy and mixed of uses in the area.

Elevational interventions explore the interplay of mass and surface; reopened or modified apertures formerly infilled, deep cuts for new shopfronts, paint coatings applied as urban scale markers in lieu of traditional signage or the ubiquitous murals of the context.

Blackfriars House

Blackfriars House is a substantial multi-tenant commercial office building located in the Parsonage Gardens conservation area of central Manchester. MGMA developed full internal refurbishment proposals (phase I) and the detailed design for a rooftop restaurant extension (phase II), securing detailed planning permission in November 2020. The work of noted Manchester architect Harry S. Fairhurst, the building is a fine example of the commercial structures built to serve the cotton industry in the city.

Fairhurst perfected the ‘dressed’ warehouse typology in response to the development of Manchester as the centre of cotton trade. These warehouses were commercial entities, clothed in the grandeur of the Edwardian baroque on their primary elevations, with highly functionalist rear elevations; in Charles Reilly’s memorable phrase, “Queen Anne fronts and Queen Mary backs”.

Blackfriars House is a relative anomaly in Fairhurst’s work, being decoratively faced to all elevations. Exposed to main streets on two sides, with the third to the River Irwell, there is no expression of the ‘grid’ on the exterior of the building, despite the systems and use being much the same as his other buildings of this typology.

Interventions include a new step-free entrance using a former service area on the Parsonage elevation, new amenities to the ground and basement floors including café and event space, and a rooftop extension and terrace. The duality of Fairhurst’s work is explored in the response to the rooftop extension, the interplay between the dressed elevation and the underlying grid. The rooftop extension draws out the internalised grid to create a lightweight extension defined by expressed structure, creating a narrative response to the setting and to Fairhurst’s body of work.

The conservation setting inspired the formal response within the building interior scheme; the arched motif used throughout references the grade II listed Blackfriars Bridge which sits adjacent to the site. The interior scheme delivers a new standard of flexibility and amenity to the Client’s portfolio, establishing an identity for the building and its mix of co-working spaces and studio office suites.

7 Water Street

7 Water Street is a grade II listed former banking premises (latterly offices) located in the heart of Liverpool’s historic downtown district, occupying half a narrow city block. MGMA secured detailed planning permission and listed building consent for the conversion of the upper floors to comprise 10 duplex and triplex apartments.

A three-storey extension has been added over the Lower Castle Street wing and the courtyard restored at second floor, replacing the lantern over the banking hall barrel vault with a terrace from which the apartments are accessed. The elevated terrace affords a hitherto unseen relationship with the historic downtown context; the adjacent signature works of Herbert Rowse at India Buildings (1924-32) and Martins Bank (1927-32) are revealed at their upper levels in a new perspective.

The morphology of the building reveals several layers of modification, beginning with an 1896 L-shaped building by Grayson & Ould for the Bank of Liverpool. Expansion to the adjacent structures creates a horseshoe-shaped courtyard building occupying half the city block. The palazzo frontage was added in 1934 by Palmer & Holden for the National Provincial Bank, along with the vaulted banking hall, displacing the courtyard. The upper storeys provide narrow wings overlooking the lantern roof over the banking hall, the Lower Castle Street side being part demolished in the mid-C20.

The new extension respects the parapet line of the existing blocks, stitching together the previously disjointed volumes of the Water Street and Lower Castle Street wings, a materially lightweight response to the granite classicism of the frontage.

The rooftop courtyard restores the horseshoe plan as developed through the 1896 and 1934 iterations; formal continuity with material change. The fluted Doric pilasters in grey granite of the Water Street frontage are echoed in the profiled aluminium mesh, solidity dissolved through perforation. The offset rhythm of the new elevations derives from the grid of the vaulted ceiling of the banking hall, itself echoed in the grid of the courtyard landscape.

Earlestown Market

MGMA Architects were invited to participate in a RIBA North West/ Liverpool City Region Combined Authority design charette, convened in February 2020 by LCR Design Champion Paul Monaghan, who is a founding Director of Stirling Prize winning architecture practice Allford Hall Monaghan Morris.

The Forgotten Spaces competition sought responses from 17 leading architectural practices from across the country to six sites in the City Region. MGMA were allocated the market square at the heart of the post-industrial settlement of Earlestown, part of the Borough of St. Helens.

The market square is the heart of Earlestown, a sizeable urban gesture at the end of the high street which links the grade II listed C19 Town Hall to the railway station. The surrounding buildings are diminutive in scale at two and three storeys when related to the context of the 8,500m² market square setting.

Recent years have seen a decline in trader numbers and shoppers, but two weekly markets still serve the square. Shopping patterns have changed, with car-based shopping parks dominating the edge and infill sites of post-industrial settlements across the region. Informal market-based trading is still a characteristic feature of northern towns, an asset to be supported and developed through complementary development. The market is a space for public gathering and exchange, and could anchor future development if supported and expanded through increased local population, creating greater demand for the market and associated services.

The MGMA position is far from radical, in that the observation of recent residential and commercial development in Earlestown are characteristic of UK-wide edge conditions in being car-focussed – as such they are fundamentally unsustainable. The automotive landscape is formed by atomised units of isolated uniformity, obliterating traces of settlement distinctiveness. Such developments deliver the paradox of individuality at all costs in low density formal conformity. They exacerbate the decline of town centres and undermine the sustainability of communities.

The housing market preference for the anonymous box is cemented by a lack of a good alternative. Beyond the metropolitan centres, there is currently no real choice. Apartments where they are offered rarely offer comparable space or amenity standards. The resultant housebuilder estate densities are low, their development forms are generic and respond primarily to the car and rarely to place; thus Iain Nairn’s prophetic remark that the end of Southampton will come to resemble the beginning of Carlisle. Or indeed Earlestown.

This is a disconnection from place; the specific history of development in the settlement, yet such developments borrow pastiche historicist forms and styles. And as observed above, social and market housing providers outside larger cities offer residents no viable choice.

If we are to respond to the climate emergency, existing settlements need to support living without the car at the local level, developed around nodes of transport for better regional movement. Existing town centres need to counter edge sprawl by re-intensifying mixed-use central places, anchored by housing, where density provides a critical mass.

The MGMA project has three strands:
• Firstly, redevelopment of the market square where residential, commercial, and civic uses are anchored by the new market hall and square, drawing on the typology of the covered market observed in other northern towns.
•Secondly, the phased densification of the town centre, adding new housing-led development, retaining and restoring the legibility of the street form.
•Thirdly, enabling the renewal of the high street through infill development and refurbishment of key existing buildings.

The new market square provides a covered market and public square, anchored by residential development, setting a new scale for the centre of Earlestown. The landscape rooftop provides private amenity for new residents, and the reformed square provides a civic space focussed on the monument. A library and health centre are housed within the new building.

Development on adjacent sites is formed by a mix of approaches. In some instances, comprehensive redevelopment restores and reinforces the legibility of the settlement grid. Other locations benefit from infill developments on vacant or underdeveloped sites, and refurbishment of key buildings, to increase density and restore street-level activity.

The phased masterplan is a 10 year vision designed to gradually increase the scale and density of the central area, eventually providing in excess of 350 new homes and spaces for businesses. Public ownership of the assets ensures long-term value for the town.

Hurst Hall

A grade II listed hall now occupied by Huyton & Prescot Golf Club. An early C19 villa substantially modified in the late C19, and dramatically altered in the mid to late C20.

The composition of the original C19 Hall must be seen as a collage of elements, the mise en scene of a collector. It is a dialogue of expansion, both in terms of a new entrant to the landed class, and as the accumulator of architectural devices. The collection remains in a fragmented assembly; some elements more complete than others. The epoch of expansion is beset by forces of contraction.

The gradual erosion of the accumulated whole, until traces of the constituent parts remain leaving only certain elements in situ: the clock tower; the water tower; the original villa. In such cases the continuity is literal; the fabric is intact. Other elements offer a hint of their former scale: the wing now occupied by the club shop and the visible traces of the building that once stood above; the veranda foundations. In these instances, the continuity may be inferred through the marks of absence. Others are elements which replaced original building fabric, but in such a manner that their presence erodes continuity: the C20 changing rooms and shower block.

The response to absence has been to infill; expansion again of sorts, but without conscious regard for the accumulated composition of the whole. As a result, the C20 infill elements are formally apologetic, materially incongruous. Their replacement is a matter of necessity given the dilapidation of the fabric. Moreover, the contribution that new fabric can make to unifying the assembled elements is the field of study for the project.

The scale of the intervention returns the site to an epoch of expansion; the project seeks a contextually familiar architecture to unify the new and existing elements, celebrating the story of expansion and contraction and giving form to the next layer of building history.

Cotton House

Cotton House is a commercial office building located within Liverpool’s business district. Dismissed by Pevsner as “…a thoroughly unremarkable block”, Cotton House was completed in 1967-69 by the London practice Newton-Dawson, Forbes & Tate.

It replaced the Old Hall Street frontage of The Cotton Exchange, demolished in 1967 at the nadir of the Liverpool Cotton Exchange. The lost was described by the Liverpool Heritage Bureau as “…the supreme architectural expression of the great power of the cotton trade and an extravagantly self-confident Edwardian Baroque design”.

Cotton House features a cast in situ concrete frame and precast elevation panels with a fine finish, featuring slender columns and profiled upstands. The crisp precast panels sat stark against the stained elevations of the surrounding buildings in the 1960s, but have latterly been overwhelmed by fussy fenestration, and recent ground floor commercial developments had compromised the legibility of the entrance.

To intervene on a building conceived in ignominy and received with critical chagrin, it is important to discover any redeeming qualities, to examine the building as found, distinct from the context of inception. Returning clarity to the elevations through simplified fenestration, and a new entrance canopy which riffs on the perspective play of grid at the rooftop loggia, the scheme also brought formality to the internal suites and common areas with a refined modulated palette.

St James Street

The Baltic Triangle describes a hinterland, a fabric shaped by a legacy of maritime and industrial uses at the edge of the city centre. Surviving historic structures provide a robust fabric suited to adaptation; a colonisable, customisable architecture which supports a diversity of occupation. More recent structures, such as the ubiquitous portal frame shed, have too demonstrated their inherent flexibility, becoming the home to a number of commercial and hospitality uses.

Recent large-scale developments and planning permissions in the area appear to support mixed use development to a limited extent. Provision is typically ground floor/ mezzanine only, with the upper storeys being monocultural residential or student accommodation.

The site is a vacant assembly of brownfield land, so unlike other recent large-scale developments, there is no requirement to displace legacy or infill occupiers. That said, the key move of the development is to allow for the colonisable, customisable space of the district to anchor the development from ground floor to the upper storeys, supporting the residential use with on-site workspace and amenities. Research focussed on the maritime warehouse legacy of Liverpool’s historic dock estate and hinterland.

The maritime warehouse typology provides a range of informing principles for the design. Robust mass and masonry/ frame construction are combined with a double height ground floor arcaded with structural arches. The arches provide home to the covered square, serviced by small scale commercial units, providing access to both the apartments and studio workspaces on the upper floors. By avoiding displacement, this development of 56 apartments and 1,000 sq ft of commercial space adopts and nurtures the smaller, adaptable uses that have transformed the area into a viable development proposition; colonisable, customisable architecture.

Vernon Street

An examination of C19/ 20 Ashton-under-Lyne shows a landscape characterised by large-scale industrial buildings, great monolithic mills and factories with their smokestacks, surrounded by housing arranged in linear row forms; the ubiquitous terrace. There is a clear social relationship between the modest two-storey dwelling and the larger industrial building, mass employment underpinned the development of mass housing in dense settlement patterns. A formal relationship can thus be observed also between the monolithic block form of the mill or factory, against the surrounding two-storey terraced housing.

Writing in the Architectural Review in 1955, Ian Nairn famously complained that the specificity of places was being eroded such that “…the end of Southampton will look like the beginning of Carlisle.” More recently, critic Jack Self has observed that “form follows finance”. These statements evidence a call to action, to deliver housing of the quality and quantity required to meet local needs, in forms that embody specific narratives of place.

It does not follow that mere repetition of an immediately adjacent form, nor imposition of a universal model, in a polite and contextually complementary material, will deliver an appropriate response to the particularity of a setting; rather a project should seek to establish narrative connections to place though form and material, to seek to embody what often may no longer be seen.

The formal relationship between the monolith block of industrial structures and their surrounding residential streets is an observable trait in the development of Ashton-under-Lyne. It represents an aspect of the heritage which, due to the loss of so many of these monoliths, is increasingly hard to locate in the settlement. The proposed development embodies this relationship in its conscious echo of the formal and material composition of industrial buildings.

The scheme seeks to push back against the policy compulsion to replicate adjacent typologies on back land sites. The previous consents establish a formal precedent, and the current proposal is developed and refined by drawing narrative connections between the formal and material composition and the particularities of place which constitute the heritage.

The building fabric becomes a suggestive document, conveying the principles of the heritage through material memory; industrial form, materiality, and proportion; echoes of the modifications which mark surviving structures of this type. Lyrical and evocative perhaps, but never nostalgic. The resulting formal and material richness delivers a connection with the past which is critical, not reverential.

Free State Kitchen

Located in a former ecclesiastical building in the Mount Pleasant Conservation area of Liverpool, Free State Kitchen is an independently-run restaurant. MGMA worked closely with the clients, a Liverpool-based team, assisting them in the choice of location, development of the branding and design concept, through to construction and fit-out.

The intimate dining room is entered from street via a tiled lobby, referencing the kitchen in the surface finish. An exposed brick panel signals the garden elevation, with picture window and door to the terrace. The new garden elevation openings are a proportional response to the existing windows, offsetting the mass of the wall.

New openings in dialogue with retained fabric; each intention is legible, each element distinct. Signage utilises the skin of existing brick, overlaid with a whitewash.

Parkfield Road

Parkfield Road is a conservation area setting characterised by mature tree cover, substantial C19 villas, and C20 infill. The building was constructed as a single dwelling circa 1840, and was last in use as a Spiritualist Church. Formerly one half of a pair of buildings, the adjacent villa was lost in the widening of the adjacent dual carriageway, leaving a secondary elevation as the gateway to the conservation area. A mid-C20 telephone exchange introduces civic modernism to the north of the site.

The materiality of the existing building reveals clear primary and secondary treatments, with the former wrapping the latter as though a refacing treatment. Expanding this line of enquiry, the new build element wraps the historic to provide a new principal elevation to the dual carriageway. The scheme exists as an interplay between the retained historic fabric and the new build elements, each representative of their era in expressed masonry.

The front elevation to Parkfield Road remains as the historic artefact, with the north side elevation a hybrid interplay of existing and new build elements. The rear and new principal elevations provide proportional formality, with a recessed bay quoting the expressed bays on the original frontage.