Village Underground, Shoreditch
“Walk along Great Eastern Street from Shoreditch High Street, look up, and you’ll spot Village Underground’s tube carriages atop a building. It cost designer and entrepreneur Auro Foxcroft £25,000 to get the 1983 Jubilee Line carriages up there by crane, with a plan to turn them into affordable, networking-friendly office space for creatives and small businesses. ‘I’m a furniture designer,’ explains Foxcroft, ‘and I couldn’t afford a studio – so I thought I’d build my own. I was on an old mountain train in Switzerland, looking at all the windows and the light, and the idea just came to me.’ So he called up TfL, which gave him some old carriages for scrap. The former trains are now days away from being finished. The seats are gone, partitioned desk areas face the windows and the doors still open at a push of an original button. As well as being 100 per cent recycled, the carriages are powered by green energy. One is for pay-as-you-go hot-deskers, the other houses permanent offices for designers, record labels, photographers and scriptwriters. There’s already a waiting list”. Cited in Time out
© 2016 Nigel Matthews (Gook the Goblin) - All rights reserved.
Do not use, download, print or reproduce any of my images without my permission!
Village Underground, Shoreditch
“Walk along Great Eastern Street from Shoreditch High Street, look up, and you’ll spot Village Underground’s tube carriages atop a building. It cost designer and entrepreneur Auro Foxcroft £25,000 to get the 1983 Jubilee Line carriages up there by crane, with a plan to turn them into affordable, networking-friendly office space for creatives and small businesses. ‘I’m a furniture designer,’ explains Foxcroft, ‘and I couldn’t afford a studio – so I thought I’d build my own. I was on an old mountain train in Switzerland, looking at all the windows and the light, and the idea just came to me.’ So he called up TfL, which gave him some old carriages for scrap. The former trains are now days away from being finished. The seats are gone, partitioned desk areas face the windows and the doors still open at a push of an original button. As well as being 100 per cent recycled, the carriages are powered by green energy. One is for pay-as-you-go hot-deskers, the other houses permanent offices for designers, record labels, photographers and scriptwriters. There’s already a waiting list”. Cited in Time out
© 2016 Nigel Matthews (Gook the Goblin) - All rights reserved.
Do not use, download, print or reproduce any of my images without my permission!