Andrew Belfield

Boundaries define sites, places, divisions and sides. Can an inhabited common boundary negotiate an alternative future for the Old Tidemill School, readdressing the way we develop our cities, placing the citizen at the centre of its redevelopment?

Since 2012, Assembly SE8, the live-in property guardians of the Tidemill school, have opened the once private site to the public. In doing so they have mobilised the community in Deptford (Deptford Neighbourhood Action) around a garden – a public common – managed and created by local citizens.

With plans under consultation to develop this site into housing this proposition seeks to ensure these spaces are valued in the city. This project, representative of nine months of negotiation, is an aspirational plan of the common neighbourhood; a tool to challenge the existing power structures of urban development; a civic infrastructure developed incrementally to house the function of the common; an inhabited interface between citizens, the local authority, and developers providing permanence for the once temporary common.