Formerly London’s oldest timber yard, Newson’s Yard in Belgravia has been transformed into a high-end retail and leisure destination, with carefully curated lighting at its core
Newson’s Yard in London’s Belgravia, on the Pimlico Road to be precise, was originally a timber yard – London’s oldest, in fact – but has now been converted to destination for high-end design and interiors shops, which surround a central airy courtyard.
The anchor tenant for the site, Wildflowers Restaurant, also recently opened, after some delay, and the whole site has been refurbished and modernised in a project led by architects Stiff+Trevillion, but with a new lighting scheme by BDP.
‘One of the big challenges with this project is that it was a very, very constrained site,’ explains BDP lighting director Tom Niven.
‘It is landlocked on four sides and has a beautiful Victorian wrought-iron roof. Plus, as it is in a very wealthy area, it has some very wealthy neighbours around it. Operationally, since being taken over by Grosvenor, it has been turned into a unique retail destination focused on small, independent, local traders. The tenants have as a result been curated very carefully.’
The fragile 1840s existing fabric was to be largely kept, with the original roof being a combination of pitched and saw-tooth sections. A lantern roof light in a timber A-frame construction runs the 35m length of the central yard and brings together a combination of timber trusses, structural steel, glazing and roof blinds.
Automated aluminium louvres have been integrated into the rooflight upstand design to facilitate smoke extraction in the event of a fire as well as for natural ventilation purposes. The rooflight is supported by the yard’s existing brick colonnade, with each of its nine timber trusses needing to be a different size to accommodate the fact it is not parallel.
DIFFERENT TIMBER TYPES
A number of different timber types were specified throughout the yard, with pine trusses supporting the lantern roof light and reclaimed timber cladding being used in the arcade lobbies. Intriguingly, the roof boards were sourced from an old World War Two aircraft hangar that used to house Lancaster bombers.
A poplar diamond-shaped plywood lighting installation is located in the public entrance arcades off the Pimlico Road footway, with further lighting hang from rendered soffits. A bespoke cut-porcelain tile design on the floor of the arcades deliberately reflects the lighting geometry.
In all, the scheme, which recently was highly commended in an Architects’ Journal retrofit award ‘was really carefully crafted’, Tom emphasises, even down to keeping the original numbering on brick pilasters, which were used to measure timber planks.
‘In many respects, it is quite a simple scheme but the point was to provide all the functional light levels that we needed at the pilasters from high level, as discreetly as could be. We’ve lit the space to the code for covered arcades at night,’ Tom adds.
MOOD AND AMBIENCE
The arcade is lit to 150 lux during day and then 75 lux at night. ‘So it is quite low for an interior environment but the point is this is about mood and ambience. The functional lighting is done from high level and we rely on daylight for a large amount of the daytime illumination,’ Tom explains.
High-level spotlighting is contrasted with much warmer wall and pendant lighting, with this all then accenting on to the timber and brickwork to bring the warmth and materiality. Cove lighting in the soffits on the entrance routes also make the space feel bright and welcoming when you come in off the street.
MITIGATING LIGHT SPILL
‘I think patience was the main learning point,’ Tom outlines. ‘There is no uplighting in the scheme at all. At the start we wanted to go to town on the roof because it is all timber, and then we would have uplit all the brick pilasters.
‘But the fully glazed central lantern is highly visible from the backs of all the houses all the way round. So we had quite an in-depth consultation process with the neighbours. We had to do a lot of work to prove that the lantern wasn’t going to be lit up like a Christmas tree and annoy all the residents at night. It is all down-lit because we could not light the lantern; we could not create any light pollution at all,’ he says, adding that an in-depth tenant design guide was also carried out.
‘We spent quite a lot of time working with the architects and the M+E engineers around the fact it is naturally ventilated. The roof opens. Which means you have airflow through the two arcades and then up into the main arcade and out through the roof. So there was a lot of work around the suspension and fixing methods to make sure they wouldn’t swap,’ Tom adds.
As a final note, late last year the project won the retail category award at the World Architecture Festival in Singapore, with the scheme being praised for its ‘dramatic double-height space at the centre of the existing yard providing daylight and sunlight in the public areas and retail units on ground and mezzanine levels’.
This is an abridged version of the full article, which appears in this month’s Lighting Journal. Click on the page-turner opposite to read the full article.
Image: Newson’s Yard, Tom Niven
