Tour: Sadler's Wells East

The project derived from Boris Johnson's dream of Olympicopolis — his idea that the Olympics should have a long-term legacy equivalent to the way the institutions of South Kensington grew out of the Great Exhibition. John Tuomey described how he and Sheila had been on the tube back to Heathrow at the time of the completion of the LSE Saw Swee Hock Student Centre and Sheila had read in the Evening Standard about Olympicopolis. Thinking that they would like to compete for it, they contacted Bob Allies about entering jointly without knowing that Allies and Morrison had already been responsible for the masterplan of Olympic Park, so were not then planning to enter. Allies and Morrison changed their mind and the two practices entered jointly with Arquitecturia, a smaller Barcelona-based practice. They won in 2015 for a set of projects which were originally all brick, a way to refer to and reinforce the industrial character of what had been on the site before and no doubt also to humanise an area which is full of grand projets which don’t have much sense of belonging.

The other buildings on the esplanade which fronts the park and hides the railway tracks beyond are no longer brick, but Sadler's Well East retains its utilitarian, part-industrial feel, with a saw-tooth roof-line and use of beautiful, hand-made, pale bricks which come from the Sant Anselmo brickworks near Venice. This makes for a satisfying combination between an industrial aesthetic — as they describe it, arte povera — and the meticulousness of the hand-made, which does not call attention to itself, but, one senses, makes for very good rehearsal spaces for dancers who don't want to have to pay too much attention to their surroundings, only to their freedom of movement within it.

We initially approached the project from Carpenter's Road, a level below the main entrance. This meant that we entered from the back. One comes in at an angle and there is an immensely generous set of fluid spaces wrapping round the auditorium and leading to the ticket desk and bar at the front.

On the tour, we went into the multiple studio spaces upstairs, calm and utilitarian, before descending to main concourse level to enter the auditorium, which is very steeply raked, with curved seating for 550 people which can be folded away and was for the opening performance. It is all very unshowy, but well-judged, great effort having been put into creating environments which feel casual.

It was good that Alistair Spalding was there because he was able to talk about the use of the spaces and indeed there were rehearsals going on during our tour. There had obviously been considerable challenges during the construction not least mounting costs and COVID, but the result is everywhere a pleasure to be in, including the beautifully spacious lifts, the generosity of the public spaces, and the recuperative balconies outside the studios.

I have watched the cultural district grow over recent years and was initially sceptical of the number of different styles of building all in a row, like pots on a mantelpiece; but now they have been built, they are beginning to cohere and Sadlers Wells East is certainly remarkably successful as a piece of cityscape, a cultural project alongside and opening up to Olympic Park, marking the junction between the park, the shopping mall, Zaha Hadid’s swimming pool and the route across a tributary of the River Lee to West Ham stadium.