Spare Street
- B1 - Business
- Food / Beverage
- Kitchen
- Meeting place
- venue / gallery
- Pedestrianised street
- Tertiary street
- Public
Key dates
1863
The London, Chatham and Dover Railway was built on a brick viaduct with a station at Elephant and Castle.
1886
Austin Osman Spare was born - an Edwardian portrait artist who lived and exhibited locally until his death in 1956.
2009
Hotel Elephant was established in 2009 as a not for profit company to provide space for Arts, Culture and Enterprise Southwark.
2011
Planning was approved for the Highline Building student accommodation. The existing building on site, an autorepair warehouse was demolished to reveal five unused railway arches. Hotel Elephant was chosen to manage the site as a new workspace for creative tenants.
2016
Hotel Elephant opened to the public. A new pedestrianised street was created next to the railway named Spare Street after Austin Osman Spare.
Axonometric Drawing
- None
- Shared Access
Operational Diagram
- Ownership
- Management
- Occupation
Architectural Plans
Spare Street is a new street named after Austin Osman Spare, an artist and oculist who worked as both a draughtsman and a painter and lived locally. Formerly covered by an auto-repair warehouse, this section of the railway siding was opened up in 2016, creating a new public thoroughfare connecting Steedman Way and Hampton Street. The workspaces, located underneath the railway viaduct, face directly onto a new student housing development which lines the opposite side of the street.
The workspaces on Spare Street are managed by a single company, Hotel Elephant, which leases space directly to users. Hotel Elephant offers two types of creative workspaces: co-working space and artist’s studio space. As part of the creation of Hotel Elephant’s facility here, significant upgrades have been made to Spare Street’s public realm. Hotel Elephant’s presence as a cultural space in itself, as well as the visibility of the creative activities taking place inside it, are presumably in response to its role not only as a production space but as a destination.
The Sidecar coffee bar opens six days a week (Monday to Saturday) and endeavours to be a social space for Hotel Elephant’s tenants, hosting exhibitions and events and offering incentives like free drinks on Fridays.
Work spaces are accessible 24 hours for those working there and the indoor spaces are visible from the street due to the fully glazed façades of the arches. Although tenants of the co-working space are highly visible from the street the workspaces are not publicly accessible with access gained through a keypad at the front door, which is advertised as being CCTV monitored.