As a practice based unit we are primarily interested in designing schools and educational environments. Throughout the year we will be researching spaces that support all pedagogies and exploring landscapes that encourage play and learning. We will also be considering notions of life-long learning for the individual, community based learning and the possibility of the street, the city as a place for learning.

Much work in the education sector currently revolves around BSF funding. With the aim of rebuilding or renewing every secondary school in England, Building Schools for the Future (BSF) is a school building programme on an unprecedented scale. BSF aspires to drive reform in creating new Academies, vocational institutions, provision for special needs and extended schools. Cottrell & Vermeulen Architecture is currently involved in two BSF projects in Birmingham and Camberwell, south east London.

Sacred Heart Secondary School in Camberwell is to be our point of reference; the site currently contains a secondary school, a Roman Catholic Church, parish facilities and an adult learning centre; the immediate environs of this campus will be our research area for the year.

Camberwell, lies on the southern boundary of the London Borough of Southwark, it is both a typical densely populated inner city neighbourhood, yet particular in its backwater character as a once affluent Victorian suburb. Camberwell has a rich historic past and for centuries people have come here for the reputed healing properties of its mineral springs. Today the centre can be understood to be at Camberwell Green a piece of common land surrounded by grand former bank buildings and Camberwell Magistrates Court. The bustling crossroads at the Green is the epicentre of our research area.

We value the need for rigorous site investigations, for reading and knowing the locality, the context. Through scrutinising communities, institutions and patterns of use (and mis-use) we will build up an understanding of the people and the places that constitute our site.

We will take mappings and readings of the polis and metapolis of Camberwell to uncover the past, the sacred, and the postcode gangs that make up this part of London. We shall look for the opportunities where learning and play might step out of the school into the urban domain (and vice versa). We are interested in leftover spaces and the resourceful reuse of buildings that is a feature of this part of London where we often find places of worship in bingo halls, car mechanics in forgotten railway stations; a parasitic architecture that finds play, learning and the contemplative in seemingly contradictory settings.

Through the year we will develop a brief that seeks to bring learning into the community. Developing relationships with an archeological precision, uncovering needs for spaces and places, seeking local crafts and skills and implementing them, finding solutions to the needs of the community within its own context.

At its root it is a school building, or a satellite part of, a dining hall, a sports hall, a music room, a classroom, a sacred/contemplative space that links to the local fabric.

Participation is key to our practice philosophy and we shall engage in public participation to consider the views and ambitions of those who live and work around Camberwell. The result of these conversations, consultations and personal speculations will be presented as a public exhibition, community event, and published as a book at the end of the first term.

The first term will also include a trip to Berlin to visit and consider amongst many other public realm projects and community buildings, the work of Baupiloten, who are also committed to participatory design and carry out joint venture building projects for local schools with the Technical University Berlin; a trip which will tie in with a small project that also unearths and considers the fabric of this much altered city.