At House Of Annetta

Today, I publish my photoessay of House of Annetta, 25 Princelet St, a project managed by Assemble, as a prelude to James Binning’s lecture at the Bloomsbury Jamboree next weekend, telling the story and outlining the work of this celebrated architectural collective.

 

ASSEMBLE: PEOPLE, PLACES & COMMUNITIES

A talk by James Binning – founding member of the inspirational, Turner-prize winning, architectural collective Assemble.

Assemble is a multi-disciplinary collective working across architecture, design and art. Founded in 2010 to undertake a single self-built project, Assemble has since delivered a diverse and award-winning body of work, while retaining a democratic and cooperative working method that enables built, social and research-based work at a variety of scales, both making things and making things happen.

James’ talk will focus on Assemble’s early work and how they produced innovative projects that were resourceful and responsive to the challenges they saw as young people and practitioners in London and around the UK.

In 2025 James set up Common Treasures, a new organisation focussing on the role for design to address challenges facing rural places, economies and communities. He is working with the Ecological Land Co-operative, an organisation that aims to build a living working countryside in ways that are equitable and ecological, through democratising access to land and supporting the development of better networks of local, regenerative food and material production, and developing low cost and low impact housing for land workers.

 

Click here to book for James Binnings’ lecture at 12:15pm on Sunday 16th November

 

When artist Annetta Pedretti died a couple of years ago, her relatives gave her eighteenth century house in Princelet St to the Edith Maryon Foundation who commissioned Assemble to turn it into HOUSE OF ANNETTA, a community centre with a focus on spatial justice – the politics of land ownership and access to housing – which is a subject of great relevance in Spitalfields. My photographs document this extraordinary partly-deconstructed house from 1710 just as it was after Annetta left it.

 

Annetta created this vaulting in her garden summer house

Annetta built these drawers into her staircase

Annetta’s timber supply for repair of her house fills the cellar

Fire damage on the first floor

Annetta made her bed of chairs and designed the paper clothes hanging above

The view over Hanbury St from the attic