We built a creative cluster in an old bus depot to kick start the regeneration of the St George’s area of Leicester. It is a £5m combination of conversion and new build to transform Leicester City Buses into Leicester Creative Businesses, a complex of studios for artists and business start ups.

RIBA Award 2005

EM Award 2006

“Cany Ash and Robert Sakula have the thriftily enterprising, lateral thinking attitude of the artist, earning their crust turning the utilitarian into gold. Tin sheds become smart theatres, old tower blocks attractive apartments. So they turn an old bus garage in Leicester with all the aesthetics of a municipal lavatory into a place of inspiration in one year with just £4.75million”
The Times

LCB In Use

LCB used to mean Leicester City Buses. The redundant bus depot, a prominent white tiled 1970’s building on Rutland Street, was incongruous among the Victorian facades of the St George’s area of Leicester city centre and many thought it should be demolished. But it had advantages. It was a solid, generously-scaled building in a central location, and there was a large yard behind it, overlooking the melancholy churchyard of St George’s Church, and connecting through to Colton Street. In the end the depot was transformed rather than demolished. It has reopened as LCB DEPOT, short for Leicester Creative Business. It contains 50 studios for artists and creative businesses, 8 hot desks as well as meeting rooms, a conference area, exhibition spaces and a café, forming a Creative Cluster which is kickstarting the regeneration of Leicester’s cultural quarter, St George’s.

LCB depot consists of two buildings and an open courtyard in between. The larger building is the old depot itself, a solid, concrete-framed, four storey building. It is a deep building, so we formed a new light well in its centre to bring light right into the heart of the building. On its upper floors are large, high-ceilinged studios, while its ground floor, as well as housing the main reception desk, also contains a hot desk area and a café: the main meeting point for the complex. The second building is a new, six storey structure, again with studios on upper floors, and whose ground floor contains a gallery space and a conference area. A further meeting room is located next to the gold box on its roof. Between the two buildings the courtyard is a venue for open air events. Both the remodelled building and the new one follow a Leicester industrial tradition where the street façades were brick, while rear façades would be in white glazed brick or tile to maximise light. A local reddish-pink brick has been used for the street façades, while the inner façades are clad in glass, sometimes clear, sometimes translucent and sometimes opaquely white. These glass façades have a complex geometry of fixed and opening windows which reflects the variety of spaces within. They also have become a blank canvas for silk screened images by Linda Schwab, one of three artists who have contributed to the project. At ground floor level, the buildings become as transparent as possible in front of public and exhibition spaces, revealing their inner workings to passers by.

Download LCB Brochure