Skinners’ Hall becomes 8½ London: fire and water, made visible for the first time

INTERIORS · LONDON

Reading time: 11 min

Skinners’ Hall has reopened as 8½ London after a four year programme by Carter Owers Studio and 6a architects. Two things made this building: a fire that burnt it down in 1666, and a river that is no longer there. Until now you could see neither. The most interesting decision in the whole scheme is a rug that draws one of them on the floor.

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Skinners’ Hall on Dowgate Hill has reopened as 8½ London, following the first major refurbishment in three decades and a four year programme of work.

The interiors are by Carter Owers Studio, working alongside architectural interventions led by 6a architects. The building is Grade I listed and also protected as a Scheduled Monument, which is a rarer and stricter designation than most people realise, and it is owned by The Skinners’ Company, one of the City of London’s ancient livery companies, with a royal charter dating from 1327.

Seventeen or more public rooms have been reworked, along with residential apartments, and the basement has been opened to the public for the first time.

That is a lot of moving parts, and the temptation with a project like this is to list them. There is a simpler way in.

Two forces made this building and neither of them was visible until now. One is a fire. The Great Fire of London destroyed the Hall in 1666, and the blackened brickwork is still there, sealed away in the cellars. The other is a river. The Walbrook runs beneath the site, buried for centuries, and the Skinners are on this ground because of it.

The refurbishment has brought both to the surface. One is left exactly as it is, charred. The other is drawn on a floor.

The river is the reason the Skinners are there

Start underground, because that is where the argument starts.

The River Walbrook is one of London’s lost rivers. It ran down from Moorfields through the middle of Roman and medieval London to the Thames, and it was culverted and built over so long ago that most Londoners have never heard of it. Dowgate, the ward this Hall stands in, takes its name from the water gate where the Walbrook met the river.

During demolition works, medieval remains of the Walbrook culvert were uncovered beneath the building, and rather than being recorded and covered again they have been kept in the narrative of the finished scheme.

Here is why that matters, and it is the fact that explains the whole site. The Skinners were furriers. Preparing pelts and skins is a wet trade: it needs running water, in quantity, continuously. The first Hall on this ground stood here because the Walbrook was here. The company’s address is a consequence of a river nobody can see.

Which makes the single best decision in the interior scheme a floor covering. In the stairwell, beneath three turn-of-the-century bronze reliefs by Robert Anning Bell, a custom rug traces the line of the buried Walbrook.

That is ornament carrying information. A pattern on a floor that is not decoration but a plan: the course of the water, drawn on the surface it runs under. Anyone who knows what they are standing on reads it instantly. Anyone who does not simply sees a good rug. It asks nothing and it explains everything, which is the hardest thing for a decorative element to do.

A blue mohair ottoman sits alongside it, making an informal break-out space next to the cloakrooms, which is the sort of unglamorous planning that decides whether a venue actually works.

The fire is still on the walls

The second force is written into the fabric, and it has been left alone.

The Great Fire of London in 1666 took the Hall. What stands today is the replacement, with the Great Hall dating from 1670, and a Dowgate Hill frontage added later in the eighteenth century. So the building is, in the most literal sense, a rebuild.

The evidence of the original survived where fire usually leaves it: below ground. The vaulted cellars still bear char from the fire, and they have now been opened to the public for the first time, reconfigured as a standalone venue with its own courtyard entrance.

That is the single biggest change in the project, and it is a rare thing to be able to offer. Most historic buildings let you see either the destruction or the replacement. Here you can stand in the burnt fabric, walk up a stair, and stand in what was built to take its place, in one visit.

The finish is the part worth studying. The vaults are treated in limewashed brickwork and limestone, and limewash is exactly the right call for two separate reasons.

Technically, limewash is breathable and vapour-open, so it lets damp masonry dry through the surface rather than trapping it behind a film. In a below-ground vault on the line of a buried river, that is not an aesthetic preference, it is building physics.

Visually, limewash is thin. It sits into the brick rather than over it, so texture, arrises and the char all continue to read through the coating. A modern paint would have made the vaults clean and mute. Limewash makes them light without making them new.

A livery hall has to be two buildings at once

This is the brief underneath everything, and it is worth stating plainly because it is what makes the project difficult.

A livery hall is the private ceremonial home of a membership body that has existed for seven hundred years. It holds silver, portraits, archives and a fixed order of events. It is also, now, a venue that has to earn its keep, hosting conferences, weddings, dinners, talks and film shoots.

Those two briefs pull in opposite directions. Ceremony wants permanence, hierarchy and a room that does one thing supremely well. Commercial hire wants flexibility, circulation, accessible entrances and rooms that can be let separately or thrown together.

The strategy is a clear one. The newly connected spaces can operate collectively for a large event, or close down into discrete self-contained rooms for private hire, each given its own identity through furniture, colour, texture and atmosphere rather than through building work.

And in the most historic rooms the approach is deliberately restrained: original proportions, panelling and finishes stay dominant, refreshed only enough to carry contemporary use. The ceremonial authority of the building is treated as an asset to protect rather than a constraint to work around.

There is a nice historical rhyme in that. The Skinners have spent longer than most negotiating their position: a dispute with the Merchant Taylors over precedence was settled by the Lord Mayor in 1484, ruling that the two companies would alternate between sixth and seventh place in the order of the Great Twelve, which they still do. English got the phrase at sixes and sevens out of it. Seven hundred years of holding two positions at once turns out to be reasonable preparation for a building that has to do the same.

The Great Hall: the work was subtraction

The Great Hall is the room with the least new material in it, and that is the point.

It holds a collection of historic silverware, period oak panelling, and large-scale murals by Frank Brangwyn, commissioned for the Hall in 1901, depicting the history of the City guilds.

What was done to it is almost entirely removal. The carpets came out to expose the original timber floorboards. The ceiling was repainted in a sombre tone, lifted with gilded guilloche detailing, guilloche being the interlaced ribbon band that runs as a border in classical ornament, and one of the few motifs that reads clearly from thirty feet below.

In the adjacent rooms the same logic runs on: timber flooring exposed and stained dark, plasterwork and mouldings restored, period bookcases unified in restrained neutral tones.

Neutral is doing something specific here rather than being a default. With murals of that scale and colour on the walls, every additional tone in the room is competing with Brangwyn. Pulling the joinery back to one quiet register is what allows the murals, the panelling and the silver to stay visually dominant. A darker floor and a calmer ceiling are not shyness. They are a decision about who wins.

In a Scheduled Monument, the furniture has to do the adapting

Here is the constraint that explains why this project contains so much bespoke work.

In a Grade I listed Scheduled Monument you cannot keep changing the room. You cannot move walls freely, cut in services casually or re-plan for each new use. Which means that all the flexibility the commercial brief demands has to be carried by the things that are not attached to the building.

So the furniture is the working half of the design, and it has been commissioned accordingly.

In the vaults, bespoke timber tables, chairs and leather upholstered benches were developed with the British manufacturer Isokon. They reconfigure for different event formats and fold away discreetly, so the same charred rooms move between a talk, a supper and a private gathering without anything being built or dismantled.

In the Parlour, fumed oak and leather Hans Wegner chairs are set around a large Regency meeting table bought at auction, with a bespoke walnut console by the British craft makers Galvin Brothers carrying bronze and glass hoop-necked table lamps from a custom lighting family designed for the Hall.

That mix is the house method in one room: a twentieth century Danish classic, a nineteenth century English antique, a newly commissioned British console and a lamp that exists nowhere else. Three different centuries and one specific building.

The Reading Room holds the company’s collection of antique volumes in walnut and glass cabinets by Benchmark, making a quiet room for members and visiting researchers, which is the one space in the scheme with no event function at all.

In the Outer Hall, a custom rug from The Rug Company takes its palette from the adjacent Brangwyn murals, and its radial pattern echoes the oculus overhead, which turns a floor into a direction. Above it, the Malmsbury Chandelier spans both levels of the space against corniced ceilings and gilt-framed portraits.

The details were cast from the building

The small moves are the ones that will be photographed most and understood least, and they share a single principle.

In the bathrooms, handmade ceramic tiles carry a fleur-de-lis motif taken from the company’s sixteenth century coat of arms.

Elsewhere, custom bronze curtain ties have been cast from historic door handles bearing the Skinners’ lynx emblem.

Read those two together and the method is clear. Neither is a motif applied to the building. Both were taken out of it. One is copied from a document the company already owned; the other is a direct cast, which is to say a physical descendant of an object in the same building rather than a drawing of it.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Heritage interiors very often reach for a period pattern from a reference book, and the result is generic even when it is accurate. Deriving ornament from the specific building means the detail can only have come from here, and it gives a visitor something to find. Nobody needs to know the lynx is a Skinners’ emblem for the curtain tie to feel considered. Anyone who does know will not forget it.

Two practices who do the same difficult thing

The pairing of studios is not accidental.

Carter Owers Studio was founded in 2019 by Hannah Carter Owers, who spent eleven years as co-director of Universal Design Studio, the architecture and interiors practice founded by Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby. Recent work includes the London headquarters for Burberry and a barn conversion in southwest France, and the studio is currently designing 60,000 square feet of events, dining, meeting and gallery space plus residential apartments at 50 Fenchurch Street, alongside Eric Parry Architects.

6a architects was founded in 2001 by Tom Emerson and Stephanie Macdonald, and has built a body of work almost entirely concerned with new architecture inside sensitive existing fabric. Raven Row in Spitalfields is now treated as a seminal adaptive reuse project; MK Gallery in Milton Keynes was named building of the year by The Guardian in 2019; the Center for Art, Research and Alliances opened in New York in 2022 inside a former playing card factory. The practice has won more than twenty RIBA Awards, been nominated for the Stirling Prize, and taken the Tessenow Gold Medal in 2023. Construction has started on its transformation of Tate Liverpool in the Grade I listed Royal Albert Dock.

What both practices are known for is the same discipline: putting new work into old buildings without either apologising or shouting. On a Scheduled Monument with a fire-damaged cellar and a lost river under the floor, that is precisely the skill the job required.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The easy version of this project is a list: seventeen rooms, four years, Grade I, a famous mural cycle, some very good furniture.

The version worth keeping is narrower. A building is usually explained by its architecture. This one is explained by two things that are not architecture at all, a fire that removed it and a river that put it there, and the refurbishment is the first time either has been available to look at.

The fire was handled by leaving it completely alone and finding a coating thin enough not to bury it. The river was handled by drawing it, in wool, on the floor of a stairwell.

Of the two, the rug is the braver move, because char explains itself and a lost river does not. Somebody had to decide that a pattern could carry a fact, and then trust a visitor to either notice or not.

That is the whole approach in one object. Take the ornament out of the building rather than off a shelf, and the room can only be this room.