Architects in residence: Designing a greener London

January 2007 – June 2007

RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) and Arts Inform established a number of  partnerships between architects’ practices and London schools. Charlton School were fortunate to be one of the chosen schools.

Pamela and Natasha of charlick+nicholson architects worked with C7 in art lessons on a project about the use and conservation of water in school. They arrived equipped with badges, investigation boxes and lots of ideas for our team of detectives.

The investigations included checking the water meter regularly to assess our consumption of water; exploring water use in and around the school; exploring how to  encourage birds into the garden; growing cress; investigating the use of technologies to save water and creating a water café to educate others.

The students took to their roles as detectives with great gusto and in the process discovered many facts about our use of water. Wheelchair users, for instance, highlighted the difficulty they had in accessing the water fountain. Colin and Tommy discovered the school already had a water butt, Katherine became well informed about the use of hippos, Lyndsay and Yousif found they could use recyclable materials to make a bird bath, Georgina grew cress through a template saying ‘Water’ and Jim and Peter took a weekly meter reading.

The film they produced with the considerable skill and patience of Kathryn, our expert in digital media, and Rachel, our music teacher, records the project’s explorations and conclusions.

The film was selected and shown at the Architecture week at the RIBA building.
Class 7 attended the event along with 300 other students from across London. The film was judged as outstanding* for originality, outstanding for presentation and very good for relevance to community.

The class presented the film at a whole school assembly to impress on all that water is precious and that we should do our best to use it sparingly.  They plan to take their findings to school council in the hope that the school management will implement some of their recommendations.

This has been a very worthwhile project. I hope you too will enjoy the film and learn from it.