• Deidra Hodgson

    Deidra Hodgson

  • Deidra Hodgson

    Deidra Hodgson

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Independent Shops & Small Chains

Cubitts: a spectacle on London’s landscape by designer Deidra Hodgson

Located on historic Park Street, the newly-refurbished borough store was inspired by religious architecture

by Georgina Johnston 08 October 2021

The store’s site was once the Borough Market Mission Hall and served as a church for the local market workers.

Cubitts brought in designer Deidra Hodgson to work on the refit. Hodgson’s aesthetic comes from an anthropological approach, ensuring there’s a feeling of warmth, but not at the expense of functionality. 

Hodgson said that ‘taking inspiration from the divine symbolism of the ziggurat, geometry of Modernist churches and Wolfgang Laib’s work, “Without Beginning and Without End”, the store evokes its previous life as a mission hall while creating a myriad style framework for its new inhabitants’. 

Taking the ecclesiastical theme as a reference point for its refurbishment, the central focus of the store is a custom-built wooden point of sale inspired by the angular altars of Modernist churches around the world. 

The frame displays are based on the ziggurat, an ancient structure first constructed by the Mesopotamians to raise their temples closer to the heavens and therefore closer to the gods. 

At the back of the store, a confessional window allows penitents to bring their broken frames for Cubitts to repair, reglaze, or refurbish Elsewhere a donation box is on hand for guests to drop off their old frames, which Cubitt will polish up and recycle, donating them to eye health charities that they work within Kenya and Ethiopia. 

Inside are bold primary colours where a colour palette was chosen after extensive research into the design details of Modernist churches. The exterior, however, retains its signature vivid yellow shade, a nod to the store’s previous incarnation as a banana and potato wholesaler.


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