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London’s Quarry

Part 2 Project 2022
Rosie Raven Nicolson
RIBA Studio | UK
There are 10 stone-clad buildings in the City of London earmarked for demolition. This project treats stone on these buildings as London’s Quarry: a pre-extracted resource which currently amounts to roughly 700m3 of stone.

The proposal is a landscape strategy and a series of public realm interventions, which uses reclaimed stone to retain and improve access to the Thames foreshore - a vital public space in Central London.

The Thames riverbed is the property of the crown estate: a public asset. This allows it a freedom which most of the privately owned riverside developments, and their so called ‘public’ realms, lack. The tide rises twice a day, changing the spatial experience of the foreshore and washing away any individual, temporary claims to it. The Northbank beaches need safeguarding, but rising sea levels put them at risk.

The project takes an approach to flood management which invites water into the City edge, expanding the foreshore boundary. Stone deposits sit between the high and low water marks, and are designed according to basic SUDs principles with no mortared joints. In all of the proposals stone is the primary structural material, used to its full potential as a more carbon efficient, cost effective and beautiful alternative to concrete and steel.

Through building out from, cutting into and leaning against the existing river wall, the proposals bring Londoners to their water’s edge, and to the shingle and mud fringes which they have a right to access.

Rosie Raven Nicolson

Tutor(s)

2022
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