Edith Neville Primary School forms the first phase of Camden’s new £89m regeneration of Somers Town. Located between St. Pancras and Euston stations, Somers Town is a short walk from some of London’s busiest landmarks yet also one of its most deprived and neglected neighbourhoods. The project provides a new school, nursery, community spaces and public realm, making it a flagship for Camden’s Community Investment Programme (CIP): the Council’s ambitious plan to invest in community infrastructure and redress the historic inequality of the area.

Edith Neville School forms a key focal point within the Central Somers Town Masterplan, replacing the previous, dilapidated school building, with a new low-energy, light-filled, 21st century education environmental.  The building is designed as an extension to the new park landscape, extrapolating the existing surrounding urban typology of ‘blocks’ and ‘courtyards’ to improve pedestrian connections, benefit ‘urban greening’ and enhance biodiversity. 

As a multi-layered park elevation, the building blurs the both the school’s and the parks’ boundaries, extending the scale of the park and offering a welcoming invitation to parents when dropping off and picking up. This family entry ‘journey’ was a key priority for the school, and the placemaking sequence from street to park to playground to central ‘gallery’ space responds to the need for social interaction and parent-school engagement, during the process of simultaneously dropping-off and picking-up multiple siblings. The result is a large ‘family-scale’ courtyard: an ‘oasis’ that welcomes families into the heart of the school, whilst simultaneously connecting it to the wider park and urban courtyard character.

As the local population’s needs change, the school fabric has been designed to respond, with the potential for upward and outward expansion embedded into the building’s sub-structure and super-structure capacity. Careful consideration was also invested to test alternative internal configurations and futureproof strategic circulation and escape arrangements. This represents an investment by the London Borough of Camden and the design team that will reduce the need for future building work, resource use and school disruption.

The project was procured through The London Borough of Camden’s Community Investment Programme (CIP), it’s ambitious plan to invest in community infrastructure and redress the historic inequality of the area without the need for central government funding.