One Million Bricks
We propose a series of pocket spaces along Whitechapel Road each with its own identity but all performing as one holistic streetscape. Community-made bricks define the surface finishes and guide natural movement. Planting and seating create a social, comfortable mid-level space. A lightweight, permeable canopy offers shade without blocking views or CCTV. Seeing the gateways as a connected sequence creates a clear, unified journey, with community-made bricks forming the symbolic thread that roots each space in Whitechapel and guides people through it.
One Million Bricks transforms Whitechapel’s gateway through an act of collective making. This honours the area’s industrial heritage while empowering its contemporary community. Each brick becomes a platform for individual expression – a unified civic gesture – uniform in dimension yet unique in material, composition, surface, and embedded narrative.
Our approach will establish a ‘community brick factory’ at the heart of the neighbourhood, a site of encounter and skill-sharing. Drawing on Whitechapel’s historic brick-making industry – which attracted the immigrant communities that shape today’s diverse neighbourhood – we will reactivate this craft tradition as a tool for placemaking. The London Stock brick, historically incorporated waste materials alongside clay: each community-made brick will embed unique materials, pigments, and patterns that reflect the maker’s identity and the area’s material culture.
This will start with the market, but grow beyond, providing the community cornerstone of each new development, a material to be embedded into residents DIY projects or as a local souvenir, paperweight or doorstop. The revenue created from the sale of each brick will be reinvested into the project to help with ongoing maintenance and local engagement.
Whitechapel’s One Million Bricks positions the area as the contemporary epicentre where heritage craft meets contemporary placemaking.
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