The Catford House
Hayatsu Architects have designed a series of careful interventions to revitalise The Catford House, formerly the Catford Constitutional Club. The project forms part of a wider town centre regeneration scheme delivered by a multi-disciplinary team led by Turner Works, including structural and services engineers Webb Yates, quantity surveyors Stockdale, and landscape architects Jonathan Cook.
Catford, a town centre in southeast London, is undergoing significant improvement and investment. Its regeneration is guided by the Catford Town Centre Framework (2021), which sets out aspirations to deliver 2,700 new homes in the area. Lewisham Council appointed a multi-disciplinary team led by Turner Works to deliver the first phase. This included the refurbishment of the locally listed former Catford Constitutional Club by Hayatsu Architects and Thomas Lane Yard, a mixed-use scheme providing 113 new affordable homes and 3,000 sqm of new public realm by Turner Works on the adjacent council-owned car park.
The project is funded by Lewisham Council and the Mayor of London’s Good Growth Fund through the Greater London Authority.
The former Catford Constitutional Club, originally a Georgian farmhouse built in 1736 and the oldest surviving building in Catford, served as a popular local pub until its closure in 2019. Successive mid-19th- and 20th-century extensions had expanded its footprint, but the building had fallen into disrepair, with some areas requiring substantial refurbishment before they could be accessed. Our task was to rescue the structure through sensitive repair and refurbishment, threading new services through the existing fabric and opening up underused spaces to bring it back into use as a pub and community kitchen.
Our design approach was to express the process of repair as a visible trace of human intervention embedded in the building fabric. Rather than concealing this work behind plasterboard, stitched brick walls and patchwork stone and plaster repairs are left exposed and celebrated. A new internal timber frame was inserted into the Georgian core, conceived as a form of permanent scaffolding that braces the existing walls. This structure frames a daylit, triple-height space with gallery access and an interwoven platform lift, forming a central hall that connects all existing rooms and makes them fully accessible. At ground-floor level, it opens onto a new garden at the northern edge of the site, linking to the future development at Thomas Lane Yard. New toilets and mechanical plant bring the building up to modern standards. The new operator, GCDA, will run a community kitchen as part of the offer, with a programme of cooking and educational classes promoting healthy food culture for local businesses and communities.
