Archive photographs of The Africa Centre at 38 King Street.

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Regular meetings with the Sounding Board were held to define design principles for the project.

The Africa Centre

Freehaus have completed the transformation of The Africa Centre’s new Southwark home. Chosen from a pool of more than 60 architects and appointed in 2019, we took on the multi-faceted challenge of intelligently representing the diverse cultures and heritages that make up modern Africa, while also creating a forward-looking space that maintained a connection to The Africa Centre’s six-decade history.

Key to the brief was for The Africa Centre’s new headquarters to be unmistakably African. Given the breadth of diversity on the continent and among the diaspora, we were keen to avoid stereotypes and well-trodden aesthetic tropes. At the same time, we wanted to avoid continent-sweeping generalisations. ‘Africa isn’t a country’ is a familiar response, often born of frustration at the dismissal understanding of the breadth in peoples, cultures and traditions that span the African continent. We wanted to turn this misnomer into a strength and envisage what an embassy for a continent might look like in the 21st century; a space that demonstrates what connects us and binds us to one another, while celebrating the dynamism of the continent.

To achieve this, we undertook an extensive research process in order to identify a series of overarching design departure points that reflected shared traditions across the African continent and global diaspora. Rather than focusing on particular motifs or patterns, Freehaus identified specific areas and themes, encompassing expressed thresholds, tactile surfaces, quality of light and practices of reuse and appropriation.

Informed by these, we chose eight themes to underpin a design direction, including themes with a focus on the collective, and on design approaches that exhibit reverence to ancestry and tradition. As well as steering Freehaus’s approach, these themes were also adopted and developed by the project’s other design collaborators – including interior designer Tola Ojuolape and brand designer, Mam’gobozi Design Factory.

The development of the building design was highly collaborative, speaking to the desire of both architect and client for the new headquarters to be informed by multiple voices and perspectives. The developing design was informed throughout by a programme of public conversations and events, including a London Design Festival discussion, and steered by a sounding board created at the project’s outset to include staff, board members, young Africa Centre trustees, and users of The Africa Centre. Visits to comparable institutions, including cultural and arts spaces as well as members’ clubs, helped to underpin their approach to core elements such as ethos, function and approach to welcome.

The overarching goal was to consider and communicate the ambassadorial role that The Africa Centre plays in representing and celebrating pan-African culture on the world stage – a forum for ideas, a platform for exchange and an embassy of optimism.