Surman Weston creates a teaching kitchen from a caretaker’s cottage

Words
Chris Foges
Photos
Jim Stephenson

The health risks raised by obesity have been highlighted by Covid, but the huge costs of poor diet were already clear enough. In the UK obesity has almost doubled in 20 years leading to rises in heart disease, cancer and many other life-limiting conditions. Unless something changes, the problem will get worse: one in three children now leaves primary school overweight or obese.

One effort to shift course has recently come to life at Mandeville Primary School in Clapton, east London, in a project by architect Surman Weston. A hand-painted mural on the gable end of a disused caretaker’s cottage now proclaims the Hackney School of Food. Every day excitable groups of young children learn how to prepare healthy meals in its well-equipped kitchen, and discover where food comes from in the surrounding gardens.

Getting to this point has been a seven-year journey that began with a tweet from Henry Dimbleby, a restaurateur then working on a government report on school meals. Might any chef be willing to quit the restaurant world in order to cook healthy food at his children’s primary school, he asked? Nicole Pisani – then a head chef in Soho – took up the challenge and was offered the job at Gayhurst Primary by its executive head, Louise Nichols, who also runs Kingsmead and Mandeville Primaries nearby. In 2018 this trio founded a charity, Chefs in Schools, which has now transformed the lunchtime offering in 35 schools, where chefs have ditched the frozen ready-meals dished up by outsourced caterers in favour of tasty, fresh plates – for for the same price.

In the same year, the charity conceived the Hackney School of Food, which it will use both to educate local children and to offer cookery courses and venue hire on a commercial basis. Surman Weston was appointed to convert the disused 1970s house following a competition, and has delivered a rich and thoughtful scheme to a tight budget: the project cost was £309,000, of which perhaps a quarter went on catering equipment.

Children enter the compound through new slatted cedar gates between a former garage – now a pitched-roofed toilet block and food store – and the house. Inside, the budget dictated careful prioritisation. The first floor was stripped out to create one double-height volume. Insulating foam has been sprayed between the roof trusses, but otherwise little was done to the walls at high level except punching a large new window to the street; even the remaining bathroom tiles have simply been painted over.

The architects set a datum at about child’s-eye-height, with nearly all of the money spent below, says Tom Surman. Walls and window reveals are lined in a reddish cement particle-board, while plywood cabinetry sits under height-adjustable stainless steel worktops. Induction hobs are set flush so that children can slide heavy pans on and off. “The logic is that everything is bullet-proof below the datum”, says Surman. “The kids are messy and it does take a beating every day. It has the functionality of a professional kitchen but with a bit more warmth”. Overhead a large industrial heater is suspended from the roof timbers, but with 30 children in the room it is rarely needed. At capacity “it is borderline mayhem”, says Surman, “but it does work”.

Externally there are new aluminium-framed windows, and where existing openings have been filled, the architects opted to use a hand-made red brick that is slightly less uniform than the existing engineering brick, and has also been used to make patios, raised beds and a pizza oven in the garden. “We wanted to bring a bit of warmth, to make a little oasis in an area where a lot of the buildings are quite grey”, says Surman. Building Control agreed that the uplift in thermal performance achieved by insulating the roof meant that the walls did not require insulation. “We were pleasantly surprised by the advice we got back from the M&E engineer, who calculated an 85 per cent improvement on what was there before”, says Surman.

Despite the financial pressures, the architects managed to hang onto some materials that might have fallen victim to value engineering, such as metal gutters and downpipes. “They are what separates the scheme from being something pedestrian”, says Surman, “so we did have some pretty firm discussions with the clients about that sort of stuff”.

Site plan showing both first and second phases of development

A second phase of the project – comprising additional planting, a propagation house and the conversion of an adjacent building into a small dining room – will cost about the same again, and will have to wait until the money can be found. The first phase was funded by donations from philanthropic foundations as well as a local authority grant, and made possible by the goodwill of many suppliers and members of the project team, such as illustrator Jean Jullien who designed the mural pro bono.

The project is intended as a prototype that might be replicated elsewhere, and the charity offers Surman Weston’s plans to any school that wants them. Perhaps it is an idea whose time has come: a National Food Strategy report to the government published in November (again by Dimbleby) identified child food poverty and education as urgent priorities; in the same week a campaign by footballer Marcus Rashford forced the government to extend free school meals into holidays and expand a holiday food activities programme. Education can only be part of the answer to food poverty or diet-related disease – lack of money is the bigger issue – but watching children happily clustered around the hobs at Hackney School of Food, it is clear to see that hands-on learning in a supportive and stimulating environment opens a rich source of interest, self-confidence and pleasure.

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