Nifty shades of grey: the fashion college where students inject the colour

It is a love letter to the wonders of needlework, a multi-storey mill for the 21st century. Our writer enters an orange peel lobby and ascends some Harry Potter stairs at the new London College of Fashion

It must be the ironing board with the best view in the capital. On the top floor of the new London College of Fashion, in a prime corner of the kind usually reserved for a boardroom, a student is busy pressing their garments in front of a rolling panorama of the Olympic Park and the towers of the City beyond. Behind the vertiginous ironing station, past serried ranks of sewing machines, a great void plummets down through the building, slicing past floors of pattern cutters and jewellers, shoemakers and prosthetics sculptors, as dizzying staircases crisscross back and forth, connecting this multistorey world of making.

“A mill building for the 21st century,” is how its architects, Allies & Morrison, describe the £216m new home for LCF, a 16-floor factory of fashion standing on the banks of the Waterworks River in Stratford, across from the London Stadium. It is an apt location for such a hive of production. Before the steamroller of Olympic regeneration arrived here, these riverbanks were home to belt-makers and sheepskin tailors, rag-traders and wig suppliers, housed in an assortment of sheds alongside car-breaking yards and aggregate crushers.

“We wanted to celebrate the area’s history as a place of industry,” says architect Bob Allies, explaining how his team took inspiration from the Yardley soap factory, a 1905 brick mill building that once stood on Carpenters Road nearby. “The college is not just about glamorous people in flowy dresses. It’s one of the few places where serious craft survives.”