Discover Greenwich Opening

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson formally opened the new Discover Greenwich Visitor Centre this week.

The new £6million pounds interpretation and education centre is within the converted Listed Grade II Pepys Building and environs, which is ideally sited at the threshold of the World Heritage Site, being located immediately opposite the Cutty Sark visitor attraction and adjacent to the main points of public arrival to Greenwich.

The project has three distinct elements: the Interpretative exhibition and Clore learning centre, the Greenwich Tourist Information Centre and a new Microbrewery with restaurant and café. Each function is required to operate both discretely but also as a whole. The adjacent newly landscaped courtyard and external approaches are also integrated into the proposals all of which are fully accessible. The project is supported with a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund together with the Clore Duffield Foundation funding.

The design proposals have created a unified and coherent whole, which draws together the different parts in continuous space, unified by use of consistent materials, architectural detailing and colour themes. Similarly the design combines careful removal of extraneous building fabric such as the defunct switch rooms in the Brewery to expose historic brick vaulted structures and complimentary new interventions such as the new steel framed mezzanine space and staircase and sensitive restoration of spaces as for example the continuous roof light lantern and windows in the education room.

The result is architecture that provides seamless integration of new and existing fabric and direct, simple patterns of public circulation and flexible operational modes. Go to Sidell Gibson website.

Discover Greenwich
The Pepys Building, King William Walk, Greenwich, London SE10 9LW
Tel: +44 (0)20 8269 479