St John & St James Music Room

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Temporary classroom, permanent music room, St John and St James CE Primary School, London

Moving children around when you’re rebuilding and expanding the school can feel like the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Sometimes it’s unavoidable that you have to rent, erect and dismantle a mobile classroom which can have a significant cost inevitably eating into the whole building budget.

But sometimes this necessary expenditure can leave a permanent legacy, something unexpected, a real bonus to the phasing and decant process and to the completed project. In this case, when the building works are finished and all children are sitting in their classrooms, the school gets a music room, with sliding-folding doors along one of its five sides that can open up to the playground to make the room a stage for performances.

Service: Architects

Location: Edmonton, London

Client: LDBS / St John and St James CE Primary School

Cost: Equivalent of a mobile classroom

Areas: 56m²

Dates: 2005