James Riley Point

The innovative refurbishment of the James Riley Point (JRP) tower includes new community and sports facilities at its base, reconfiguring the building’s internal and external amenities to align with modern housing policies. This renovation also aims to reduce the building’s embodied carbon and upgrade its 136 homes to meet the Passivhaus EnerPHit Standard. The innovative refurbishment of the tower, combined with a new state-of-the-art Multifunctional Leisure, Community and Sports Centre, provides an opportunity to rethink this historic building’s future.

Illustrating that sustainable retrofit can be beautiful and architectural, the refurbishment of JRP rises from its plinth of eight sculptural columns (reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s Unité) and highlights the homes the tower affords with picture-box framed balconies designed to provide a sense of safety, security and enclosure.

These new policy-compliant balconies replace the existing shallow inset terraces which have been absorbed within to improve home internal areas, improve building form factor and eliminate thermal bridging.

At the same time, the external vertical grid of aluminium fins embraces the verticality of the tower, and provides shading to the glazing while allowing the desired levels of daylight within the apartments.

Inspired by the vibrancy of the diverse Carpenters community, and the historic legacy of the nearby 18th century Bow Porcelain factory, the building has then been clad in coloured glazed ceramics that give it a domestic and humanist quality, while celebrating JRP as a landmark building.