Vocation in the City takes a perspective on the crafters of historic urban centres, exploring how their collective dedication to the advancement of their craft in learning, developing, and exchanging skills served as a catalyst for forging close knit communities.

Bermondsey was historically one of these thriving centres. Its proximity to the Thames made it London’s first port of call from across the world, feeding into a booming centre of craft and trade. Diverse urban public life grew around it, with bustling spaces for trade. The advent of containerisation and the Thames’s decline as an active trading route saw this once thriving working class community fade.

This project proposes the reinvigoration of a disused market square to provide a design craft school interested in the learning, developing and exchanging of historic craft skills. Vocation in the City explores how vocational pedagogy can provide varying extents of human interaction and friendship in an all too segregated city. This school aims to bring the once bustling life back to the square while also creating a real place for the community to learn and reconnect with the area’s once thriving craft history.