DRDH Architects has used a concrete frame to separate and organise different functions within a library-cinema-housing hybrid in the London borough of Bexley. Could this provide a template for UK town centres?
Sidcup Storyteller, which has won a RIBA National Award, offers an intriguing subplot in the tale of the ailing suburban high street. Designed by DRDH Architects, the building packs a lot of action into its narrow, rectangular corner site. On the ground floor, there’s a streetfront cafe, and adult and children’s libraries. Above, there are three cinema screens, a studio and co-working spaces.
At the back of the building are nine apartments, the sale of which subsidised the council-led development. With its prominent curved entrance tower, the Storyteller has been credited with rebranding Sidcup High Street, contributing to a sharp increase in visitor numbers and an equally dramatic fall in vacant shops, as well as a 100% rise in library membership.
As with any good story, structure was key. The library is an in-situ reinforced-concrete frame built off a raft foundation. A floating concrete floor above the first-floor slab provides vital separation from the box-in-box cinema auditoriums. Acoustically speaking, it would have made more sense to put the cinema on the ground floor. “But as a public building, it was really important that the library came first,” says project architect Paolo Scianna, an associate at DRDH. “Concrete is obviously really good at attenuating sound, and the frame was critical to achieving an impressive level of isolation. They can be playing a blockbuster upstairs and you can’t hear it in the library at all.”
The structure is designed to quietly usher people through the different spaces. Beneath a mezzanine floor in the double-height cafe, a “compression space” leads into the double-height library. The floor height then drops back down to 1.5 storeys in the children’s library.
This space is also embedded slightly in the sloping site, which rises 1.5m from front to back. “We used the raft foundation as a kind of tray to create this protective, enclosed space, allowing the children’s library to be more nestled,” says Scianna. The raft had another advantage – its shallow depth avoided the roots of a 150-year-old Holm Oak tree, which stands guard over the back of the library.
At the front of the building, the entrance is expressed dramatically as a three-storey drum, emerging from the side of the building like a camera film. This art deco flourish – “a deliberate nod to 1930s cinemas” – is set back from the road, allowing space for pedestrians to negotiate the busy junction, while simultaneously emphasising the Storyteller’s civic status. Like the rest of the library, the drum was cast in situ from reinforced concrete. The curves were formed using plywood shuttering, wetted to help it bend.
“The entrance was a critical space to get right – it had to feel like a shared space,” says Scianna. It is one of several key public areas where the concrete has been left exposed, with neat joints and a matt finish from the paper-faced plywood. A deep groove was cast into the back wall of the entrance well, allowing the curved glazed doors to open against the concrete.
Behind the entrance, a U-shaped staircase leads up to the cinema, its half landing curving around the inside of the drum. Due to the constraints of the narrow site, the stair was cast in situ and tied into the first-floor slab with starter bars, adding stiffness to the frame.
Exposed concrete has been deployed throughout the public areas. Above the library, a grid of beams reads almost like a building diagram, helpfully relating the inside to the exterior. One extends from the front of the cafe and crosses the grid at an oblique angle, following the line of the second-storey external wall of the cinema rather than the ground-floor perimeter. “It’s a very tectonic language,” says Scianna. “You always get the sense that the frame is picking up the building and taking it down to the ground.”
As with the entrance drum, the exposed elements were cast with MDO plywood formwork. A 40-50% GGBS mix was used throughout, which has lightened the concrete, as well as helping to reduce embodied carbon. The coffered slab also meant floor depths were reduced by 25mm to 225mm.
Embodied carbon was measured using the RICS Whole Life Carbon Assessment method, covering lifecycle stages A1-A5, B1-B5 and C1-C4. The resulting figure of 556.2kgCO2/m2 is below the RIBA’s 2030 target of 750 and 625 kgCO2/m2 for offices and domestic buildings respectively (there is no direct comparison for this particular type of hybrid).
Externally, the Storyteller is wrapped in red brickwork, responding to the traditional Metroland frontages on the other three corners of the junction. This is complemented with horizontal bands of red-pigmented precast concrete. “We weren’t necessarily trying to match it 100% but we wanted it to look quite monolithic,” says Scianna. “There was already a lot going on, with the ground-floor programme and the large windows.”
On both the front and side elevations, the words “Library & Cinema” have been cast in, raised in relief from the precast panels by 20mm. “We were thinking about high streets and permanence, and these buildings that still declare their function from a long time ago. Even if the function changes in the future, you always have this memory.”
Sidcup Storyteller offers an alternative narrative for UK high streets. Scianna points out that the cinema industry has starred in a similar tale of decline, driven by disruptive technologies, before embarking on a new chapter. Sidcup’s own art deco cinema closed in 2003, at a time when out-of-town multiplexes and video rental stores seemed to be the future of film-watching. But the town’s Blockbuster store has also now been demolished. And there’s a twist: its site now houses the Storyteller, a homage to cinema’s golden age. “It’s a nice kind of circularity,” says Scianna.