Wellfit+Hardess | METAPHORM ARCHITECTS

Metaphorm, acting both as architect and development manager, has designed a mixed‑use scheme at the junction of Victorian railway viaducts in Loughborough Junction that anchors a creative light‑industrial hub beneath 170 market and affordable homes (35%) in two slender towers of 29 and 20 storeys.
Large, high‑ceilinged shared workshops and flexible mezzanine studios form an employment‑led ground plane for craftspeople and makers, complemented by cafés, meeting spaces and upgraded public routes, including a widened viaduct passageway and new open spaces that knit the site into its surroundings and reinforce the area’s emerging identity as a centre for creativity.
The differing demands of industrial and residential uses are carefully managed through front/back and top/bottom separation: publicly visible, accessible workspaces face the street, more robust light‑industrial zones sit to the rear, and an open‑air communal amenity floor buffers the dwellings above from the workshops and rail infrastructure below, while the two towers together mark the viaduct crossroads with a distinctive silhouette alongside neighbouring high‑rise development.
Responding to the capital‑wide loss of studio and workshop space and urgent need for housing, the project is piloting a new socio‑economic and urban model for co‑locating creative employment and living. Its architectural principles aim to create comfortable, unencumbered relationships between homes and workspaces through carefully designed interfaces, demonstrating how hubs of specialist production for artists, designers and makers can be embedded within residential neighbourhoods; in doing so, it establishes a new hybrid building and planning typology with potential for wider application on similar urban sites.