Projects
New, New England House is a project to find an alternative future for New England House, a council-owned, eight-storey factory in Brighton.
New England House currently provides affordable workspace to an amazing community of over 100 makers: artists to architects, bakers to ceramicists, sculptors to software developers, wood-workers to wind-turbine testers (and us, unit 6, level 6). It is organic, collaborative, multi-disciplinary and publicly-owned. No council could build anything like this today.
The building is also about to undergo a £10m regeneration, which represents both a threat and an opportunity for the community that exists here.
New, New England House aims to develop an ambitious, alternative future for the building, from the inside out. We want to find a model that can support affordable workspace in perpetuity, create a new economics for the building, and re-position the building as an open, affordable and public factory for the benefit of the whole city.
We’ve brought together a team of Assemble, Peter Nencini and Europa. We’re currently putting together a plan to create a working model of New, New England House, in a space inside the building, to culminate in an exhibition next year.
Information
We create radical, bottom-up regeneration projects, which aim to get inside the machinery of urban regeneration, and use it for good instead of evil.
We specialise in reactivating dead buildings and dead spaces, harnessing unused potential in a community, and creating projects that address the economic and social issues that are causing the problem in the first place.
We work with local authorities, private developers, architects and community groups. Our work has produced new cultural infrastructure and interventions across the country, and been featured across the national press.
Spacemakers is led by Matt Weston and Tom James, and was founded by Dougald Hine. We're based in Brighton, London and Stockholm.
Website designed by Jon Cannon, built by Rich Cook.
Along with our project work, we have a strong history of consultancy.
We’ve been part of the Greater London Authority’s Special Assistance Team since its inception in 2011. During this time, we’ve worked with London boroughs on projects as diverse as public space, workspaces, local economics and identities. We’ve also worked nationally, advising on market squares in Basingstoke and university campuses in the midlands. And we’re part of NESTA’s New Radicals, a network of radical organisations changing Britain for the better.
We’re often brought in early on, to work out what the right strategy for a project is long term. We use the experience we’ve gained from our own projects to advise others on how best to bring their buildings, spaces and communities back to life. We’re honest, we give critique and we have ideas.
We do feasibility, problem solving and ideas generation, from a single day to an entire year. If you have a project that could do with some new thinking, please get in touch.
+44 (0)7740 345828