Cricklewood, in north-west London, is a community on the borders of three boroughs, and thus tends to be civically ignored: it has no public space, no town hall, no library, not even a bench.

In response to a site-activation brief as part of a wider project, Spacemakers proposed Cricklewood Town Square: a mobile public space, which could roam across the area, reclaiming forgotten patches of land, and transforming them with a programme of events into civic space for everyone to use.

We commissioned Kieren Jones to design a town hall on wheels, which ranged across Cricklewood for a month, occupying such unlikely spaces as a grass bank next to B&Q, an empty pavement outside the Bingo Hall, and the roof of a car-park. At each site, a programme of events activated the space, based on William H. Whyte’s seminal film 'The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces'.

In effect, the project was a bicycle-powered Trojan Horse, aiming to set a precedent: to demonstrate to a neglected community how useful public space can be, and how vital it is in forming that community in the first place.

Cricklewood Town Square ran in September 2013. It was funded by the Mayor of London's Outer London Fund and LB Barnet, and was part of a wider series of projects led by Gort Scott Architects. Photography by Theo Simpson.