Reclaimed granite from a demolished Broadgate office building now forms the load-bearing walls of the Maida Hill Public Toilets — a civic pavilion completed by Studio Weave in North Paddington, London, where stone that once dressed a City of London corporate headquarters has been recut and reassembled as the structure of a public convenience serving a neighbourhood market. Not recycled in the background. Not hidden under render. The reuse is the architecture.
The material has a specific biography. Pink Finnish granite and Norwegian larvikite — formerly hung as decorative cladding on a steel frame at Broadgate — now stand without a supporting skeleton at Maida Hill Market, reassembled as self-supporting walls around an automated public convenience unit. The stone was reprocessed as little as possible: large slab modules retained their original dimensions, keeping either the polished finish from their previous life or the raw split face produced during cutting. What was decorative skin has become reclaimed stone structure — a reversal developed in close collaboration with fabricator Stone Masonry Company (SMC) and structural engineers Webb Yates.
The architects call this “deep reuse,” and the term carries a precise architectural meaning. It is not salvage for carbon accounting, nor materials recycling as a footnote in a sustainability report. Deep reuse asks the material to carry its own history through the city. The stone at Maida Hill has made an improbable journey — from the financial district to a local market square, from private corporate architecture to public civic infrastructure serving a mixed Westminster community. That trajectory is legible in the building. The cut marks and surface variations left by the processing are not concealed; they are part of what the structure communicates.
The project lands in a context of measurable civic failure. The British Toilet Association estimates that 40% of the UK’s public toilets have closed since 2000 — a contraction that disproportionately affects people with disabilities, the elderly, parents with young children, and those who work outdoors. The Maida Hill building replaces former underground conveniences, inaccessible by definition, with three ground-level units including a fully wheelchair-accessible toilet. The brief came directly from community consultation, making the building a direct response to documented local need rather than a civic gesture from above.
The stone carapace stands independently of the internal mechanism. The automated toilet unit can be replaced or upgraded without touching the stonework; the stone itself has been detailed to be demounted and reused again in a future application. Studio Weave describes this as designing with another life already in mind. SMC has a name for the broader principle: the “urban quarry” — the idea that cities already hold vast reserves of high-quality material inside buildings that will eventually come down. Rather than quarrying new granite from Finland or Norway, the project mined what was already present in the city fabric. It is an argument about where architects look for material, and the answer proposed here is: closer, and later.
Eddie Blake, director at Studio Weave, is unambiguous about the seriousness the practice brings to commissions at this scale. “We design public toilets no differently to how we design all of our public architecture, with rigour and care,” he said. “We all know that good quality civic design needs to include adequate provision for public toilets. At Maida Hill we have been lucky to be working with a great client that believes in investing in civic infrastructure — both Westminster City Council and the Mayor of London should be commended for investing in the public good, in these lean times.” The building does not perform civic generosity through scale. It does it through the decision to take an unglamorous typology seriously.
SMC’s position reinforces the material logic from the fabricator’s side. “The SMC have always looked to innovate with natural stone to lower their carbon footprint,” the company said in a statement. “Using the ‘lost and found’ stones that are already in our cities and towns means the lowest possible embodied carbon. Those silent witness, large stone slabs and blocks have still a lot to say. By using large format blocks originally, the 1970s builders handed over a material that we can use again and again.” The observation reframes the embodied carbon in reused stone not as a workaround but as an inheritance — material passed between generations of builders rather than extracted anew.
The building is embedded in a considered landscape developed in partnership with Tom Massey Studio. Crevice planting — including native sea thrift running through the stonework joints — ties the built fabric into the ground without requiring irrigation. Boulders serve as informal seating and extend the architectural language across the boundary between structure and public realm. The planting palette is low-maintenance by specification, not default: an ecological response calibrated to a setting that receives fluctuating management. The Maida Hill project is the final phase of the market improvement works, funded by Westminster City Council and the Mayor of London’s Good Growth Fund as part of the North Paddington Programme.
The question of what an unglamorous building type deserves runs through several of the most rigorous civic projects in recent years — from the reframing of the public toilet as a cultural installation in POP&ROLL in Budapest to the contextually precise public amenities proposed for Camperdown Memorial Rest Park by Carter Williamson Architects. Studio Weave’s answer at Maida Hill is neither decorative nor symbolic: it is structural, material, and reversible. In a city that has systematically dismantled its public convenience infrastructure, a building designed to be demounted, reused, and outlast its first purpose is not a modest contribution. It is a specific proposition about what civic permanence should look like.