Architecture practice Unit 38 is working with advocate organisation Revoke to create a permanent educational space -and eventually a school - for children arriving alone in the UK as migrants and refugees. The emerging Bethnal Green-based design collective is led by Ben Beach, 33, Jamie Hignett, 29, and David McEwen, 32, and focuses on delivering 'high impact' social projects. Who are you? Unit 38 is named after our first office above nail salon Pretty Nails inside Seven Sisters Indoor Market at Wards Corner, Tottenham - more popularly known as the Latin Village. We found each other through a shared frustration with the authoritarian models of regeneration now typical across British cities, which often dispossess communities only to accelerate the housing crisis. In 2018, we began collaborating with the traders to prepare the Wards Corner Community Plan to prevent the market, a vital cultural hub for working-class migrants, being luxury-flattened by one of Britain's largest developers. Faced with a seemingly impossible task, we founded the practice shortly afterwards on the basis that we couldn't lose any money if we didn't have any to start with. Five years later, we're still here, as is the market, with the landowner (Transport for London) and local authority (Haringey Council) now committed to a community-led future for the site.
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