The Curated Celebration of Angerstien’s Aggregate Wharf

The Curated Celebration of Angerstien’s Aggregate Wharf intertwines ongoing industrial processes with a new complex of public access. Angerstien’s Wharf is Europe’s largest sea-dredged aggregates terminal: recycling, grading, and shipping gravels and sand used in the construction and road building industries. It has a quasi-monumental character, with huge piles of aggregate constantly evolving and shifting amid a complex system of conveyors and structures. However, while this innately transient landscape is a wonderful and rare thing to behold – with metropolitan land values seemingly ever-rising – the future of such a large-footprint industry in a location so proximate to London’s expanding waterfront developments is not secure. 

The Curated Celebration of Angerstien’s Aggregate Wharf proposes a new initiative which permits public infiltration into the industry. In doing so it creates a new typology of urban space and allows industry and the public to interact in ways not previously possible. The site will purposefully celebrate the flow of materials. Pedestrian spaces will be opened and closed by the movement of aggregate and routes through the site will evolve in line with the industrial cycles, curated levels of engagement and interaction permitted at certain points. The proposal uses material properties and industrial processes characteristic to the site’s very function to define the public spaces within it. Interventions, varying in scale and subtlety, provide views and experiences to the pedestrian visitor.