Aberfeldy Health Centre & Café
2024
© Sam Bush
© Sam Bush
Assemble were commissioned by Poplar HARCA, a Housing Association in East London, to develop an open, informal and welcoming set of ground floor spaces for an NHS GP Surgery that was moving in to a new build, mixed use development.
The layouts for the space have been developed in close dialogue with the client, Poplar HARCA, the NHS project management team led by East London NHS Foundation Trust, the Aberfeldy Practice GP’s and their appointed architects for the clinical parts of the project, Sonnemann Toon.
The materiality, colour palette and character of the fixtures and fittings is intended to share a common language across the public ground floor areas of both the cafe space and the health centre, giving both spaces a shared look and feel that is richer and more varied and less institutional and clinical than these kinds of environments are typically.
© Sam Bush
The café layout provides an efficient and practical servery area organised to enable simple, speedy customer pay-and-collect flow. The kitchen is specified with a range of high-quality equipment and services to enable it to function as a preparation kitchen serving freshly prepared hot food and drinks.
The Education Space is acoustically separate to the Main Café space, adding extra capacity but also greater privacy and flexibility within the spaces available for public, community and medical use at different times to support the varied kinds of social and educational programmes that Poplar HARCA and the GP’s are developing in partnership.