NEW DINING HALL FEATURE
INTERVIEW WITH THE ARCHITECTS Homerton’s beautiful new dining hall is open for business and, from the clusters of students revising in the Buttery, to the coffee drinkers on the external built-in benches, it has seamlessly become an integral part of College life. Architects Ed Fowles and Eleanor Hedley of Feilden Fowles, whose design won an open competition five years ago, describe how they responded to former Principal Professor Geoff Ward’s ambition for the building, and the thrill of seeing it in use.
What excited you about this project? Ed: When the competition was announced in 2016 it was a massive long shot for us. We’d never delivered a public building, or something on this scale, and most of our competitors were people we’d looked up to as students. But it’s such a rare opportunity: Cambridge Colleges usually already have a dining hall and in many cases they are hundreds of years old. We were also excited by Homerton’s unique and progressive character and
its beginnings in East London, which really resonated with me, as I’ve lived in Hackney for 15 years. Eleanor: The fact that Cambridge is where I studied, at Magdalene, meant that I understood the sense of ceremony that the dining hall has to carry. If someone had told me when I was a student that one day I’d design the Homerton dining hall, I’d have been thrilled! It was also very exciting to have a client with such high ambitions for what they wanted to achieve.
22_0301 H2A Homertonian Newsletter(5119) 2022/08/10 17:44:31
Jim Stephenson
The new dining hall connects with and echoes the Ibberson building
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HOMERTONIAN
