Vacant Shops Programme

Pilot Shop, 45 Walm Lane

The New Windows Pilot Shop is no longer available to the project as a new commercial tenant has just moved in to this previously vacant premises.

The project had secured short-term access to the shop and had transformed it – with the help of designer Kieren Jones and trainees from the College of North West London – into a local information point where people could come and find out about the project and from where we ran workshops in the run up to Christmas last year.

We are happy to say that the reactivation of the empty space for ‘meanwhile’ use has had its desired effect: it has attracted a new business into an empty unit, enabling it to act as commercial premises once more.

Kieren Jones is a designer, maker and researcher based in London, producing small-scale architecture and design interventions in response to the built environment. Through his work, Kieren is particularly interested in exploring the notions of amateurism, anti-design and the position of craft and making in the 21st Century.

Kieren’s work has been widely exhibited in creative institutions such as Somerset House, the Barbican, the IABR, V&A Museum, the RSA and the Gwangju Design Biennale 2011 curated by Chinese Artist, Ai Wei Wei. He has also collaborated with The Architecture Foundation and The British Council. In 2010 Kieren was party to setting up an architecture and design collective called StudioSuperniche that produced the ‘Blue Fence Project’ creating a series of useful objects from the blue fence surrounding the Olympic site, critically examining the notion of legacy with relation to the 2012 Games.