Stephanie Cheung

I conducted various types of research to get a better grasp of the project site in order to craft clear guiding questions for the design proposal. During our first visit to 25 Bowater Road, I noticed that the surrounding area was sprawling with industrial qualities. I saw lots of young children roaming the high speed A-roads after school. As a gut reaction, I thought that this couldn’t be a safe or nurturing urban environment for young children. Simultaneously, I learned that the surrounding area is currently going through a long term process of redevelopment and urban renewal. Our site is a transitional industrial area where 374 new affordable homes will be built - occupied by first time buyers and their young families. 

I then proceeded to interview stakeholders at the Greenwich Trust Secondary School and Windrush Primary School, located just south of the site. I learned that mothers of young children in Woolwich face various challenges that relate to after school care. According to the Office of National Statistics, the cost of childcare is at £32,000 on average, per annum. Many mothers face stalled careers after having children, with 68% reporting this issue. The lack of affordable and flexible childcare is a significant barrier to mothers who want to increase their earnings and work more hours. Rising energy bills, inflation and high interest rates also add to the financial burden faced by these mothers.

I had the privilege of meeting the Lee Family—a single mother, Connie, and her two children, Amy (16) and Samson (12). Like me, they recently relocated from Hong Kong to the UK. Samson, who misses playing pickup basketball with friends back in Hong Kong, finds himself feeling a bit lonely after school. Although he enjoys the absence of homework, he struggles to figure out how to make the most of his spare time. As a response, I created a basketball hoop that looks like a stool, using materials from the domestic sphere to capture Samson’s isolation and clumsiness. 

To summarise: the current infrastructure of after school care is prohibitively expensive and inflexible. Currently, only parents of a certain income bracket can afford to work in professions that offer hybrid Work from Home policies. Immigrant families find it challenging to forge genuine adult connections and friendships with other families. Even if the parents can work from home, children under 5 are not yet independent and require constant attention, making it very difficult for parents to focus on their work. Lastly, parents prefer supervised, safe play areas that are conveniently located near their work, school, and residence, particularly during the colder and darker winter months when outdoor play options are limited. Thus, my guiding questions became, “How can design support the child care needs of parents in Woolwich?” and “How can the network of schools support the after school needs of children and their families”.

My response is a versatile child care and coworking space that can be used for care outside of school hours. The project considers three kinds of play, recreational sports, children’s play and adult intellectual play - interlocking them spatially in one exploratory space. I was inspired by the approach and materiality of works by Aberrant Architects and Assemble Architects. Especially with Assemble ‘The Brutalist Playground’, I wanted to emulate the soft and supple nature of their foam recreations of post-war play structures, and reference how they crafted indoor terrains that blur the boundaries between inside and outside.

Previous design exercises influenced the forms, set the mood and design approach of the final proposal. In the first exercise, I sought to pay homage to Woolwich’s rich history of steel usage in weaponry and industry. The resulting maquettes serve as a testament to the strength and ductility of steel, drawing inspiration from the renowned works of Richard Serra and Brancusi. In a subsequent exercise, I responded to the CS Faraday, a groundbreaking cable-laying ship constructed by Siemens Brothers in 1874. Its remarkable feat of laying eight transatlantic cables revolutionised global communication, playing a vital role in shaping the modern internet we rely on today. The experiments with oil pastels and plastics gave me the confidence to lean into my inner child, finding confidence in an experimental, playful and tactile design approach.

These exercises also provided the foundations for a tactile, earthy, durable material palette that could be tuned according to the activities of the end user. Parents and children form opposite ends of the spectrum - different colours and finishes of cork, rubber crumb, reused oak, mild steel, supple leathers are functional and set the mood of the proposal. 

In its initial iterations, the proposal encompasses two floors, featuring an indoor running track with workbenches scattered within an open play zone. This design highlights the belief that the needs of both the adults and children, as well as the balance between work and play, are equally significant. The feedback revealed holes in the scheme and brought us back to the initial pain points: How do you design the space so that parents can have various levels of focus within a close proximity of their children? What activities can you program into the space to encourage the exchange of skills and ideas? The current project as it stands assumes a certain class/wealth demographic that allows hybrid work and will not be particularly useful to shift workers, teachers, nurses etc. To what extent are you maintaining the status quo, how are you lifting all women up?