Content area
Full Text
With the transformation of an empty buiLding into the Hackney Picturehouse, Fletcher Priest has put the finishing touch to the regeneration hopes at the heart of the borough, says Esme Fieldhouse
The recently opened Hackney Picturehouse finally completes the square that already contains the Hackney Empire theatre, Central Library and Museum, and Town Hall.
\ The latest addition is not newly built however, but a marriage of the former Methodist church and Carnegie Library that date from 1924 and 1907 respectively, and it was the music venue Ocean that had first bonded these two buildings together in a flurry of optimistic newmillennium vision to regenerate the heart of Hackney, in east London.
Opening in 2001, Ocean did not live up to the hopes it set out with, and rather than tying together the local community it became a silent hulk glaring at the council HQ across Mare Street. Envisaged as a live music venue to rival those in north London, and one which would fund an innovative education programme, Ocean was plagued by debt from the outset and closed for good in 2010.
'At the beginning of the project, we asked people if they knew what Ocean was, and no one did,' says Mareike Langkitsch, Picturehouse project architect at Fletcher Priest. 'We knew we had to be crystal clear what...