PEARCE+’s demountable timber pavilion for Camden Inspire explores how reclaimed materials, collective making and simple shading strategies can help communities respond to increasingly hot urban environments.

Photos
Ben Sage, Samuel Bray

PEARCE+ has completed a full-scale shading pavilion for Camden Inspire, developed with campaign group Shade The UK and assembled with hundreds of festival-goers. Commissioned by Camden Town Unlimited and Euston Town BIDs, the structure forms the centrepiece of Guerrilla Shading, an initiative exploring practical responses to rising summer temperatures in towns and cities. Currently installed at Camden Collective, the pavilion is intended to move between locations rather than remain a one-off festival structure.

The project takes its cue from the guerrilla gardening movement of the 1970s, applying a similar do-it-yourself approach to urban cooling. Rather than treating shade as something dependent on large-scale infrastructure, the initiative proposes that overheated streets, gardens and public spaces can be adapted using inexpensive structures made from reclaimed and readily available materials.

The pavilion itself is formed from five prefabricated timber panels, dimensioned so that the entire structure can be transported in a single van. The components can be dismantled and reassembled elsewhere, allowing it to operate as a reusable piece of shade infrastructure. Its tapering frame was engineered to resist the wind loads created by the tensioned shade sails, while the timber was salvaged from previous PEARCE+ projects.

Construction was deliberately left incomplete when the festival began. Visitors were invited to finish the lower part of the structure themselves, braiding and weaving reclaimed fabric donated by Cameron Hot Air Balloons and Inflate Studio through the timber frame. The process gradually enclosed the pavilion to form a shaded, cocoon-like gathering space. Beyond it, naturally dyed canvas sails produced with artist Auda Sakho extend the area of shade into the surrounding garden.

As the pavilion took shape, people exchanged their own approaches to keeping schools, gardens and allotments cooler, turning its construction into an opportunity to discuss how communities might adapt to hotter summers. “Making something together is a brilliant way to start conversations, share skills,” explains PEARCE+ founding director Owen Hughes Pearce.

The project responds to the particular problems of heat in dense urban areas. On a 37°C day, radiant heat can make conditions in direct sunlight feel closer to 47°C, while roads and metal surfaces can become between 10°C and 30°C hotter when exposed to the sun. Closely built neighbourhoods can then retain and release this heat after sunset, contributing to the Urban Heat Island Effect. Alongside the pavilion, PEARCE+ has produced Guerrilla Shading Our City, a free guide setting out ways of introducing shade at different scales. Suggestions range from external shutters and domestic shade sails to campaigns for street trees, as well as guidance on working within conservation areas. Together, the pavilion and guide are intended as a starting point for residents to test similarly modest interventions in their own streets, gardens and neighbourhoods.