The London Bus Stop Reimagined at PEARL

A London bus stop... a forlorn shed that comes abuzz during rush hour and returns to its solitude of silence when commuters depart for their destinations? In some circles, this picture slinking into your head will be given a pass, but a cohort of London’s budding architects would beg to differ.

Photo Credit: Luke O'Donovan

On April 10th and 11th, the Accelerate cohort of 2025 brought their ten-part programme to a climax at UCL’s Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory (PEARL). During this two-day workshop, a bus stop, what some people might consign to the realm of the mundane, was reimagined, given a bright lick of paint that captured the essence of communal experiences, the essence of the built environment. The one-hundred-and-twenty strong cohort, all of whom are from underrepresented backgrounds, worked on a brief to design and build a London bus stop under four different weather conditions, their designs informed by their lived experiences.  Over the course of two days, the students went through a rapid design process, exhibiting humbling creativity to transition their sketch designs on the first day of the workshop to life-sized one-to-one structures the following day, designs that gave the otherwise forlorn sheds a beating heart plucked from the students’ collective and individual lived experiences.

Accelerate, which is Open City's flagship education programme, has provided students from underrepresented backgrounds with the opportunity to study architecture and the built environment subjects more broadly for thirteen years.

Guest Speaker, Ian Goodfellow of Perkins & Will and lead architect on the creation of PEARL, spoke of the laboratory’s uniqueness, from its conception in the brief presented – to build a house that would host the world – as well as its circular economy and status as being UCL’s first carbon negative building.

Photo Credit: Luke O'Donovan

Siraaj Mitha, an architect who teaches architecture at the London School of Architecture and runs the Accelerate programme, touted PEARL as an incredibly useful education tool, the building and parts of its operations being expansions of what the students had been taught over the past ten workshops; the testing of designs to get something right in the end with the aim of making the world a better place. In expressing his gratitude, Siraaj said, ‘I think that being able to understand how deeply things are considered during the design process encourages the students to consider their own designs, and I think that is such a valuable lesson to learn at an early stage in your education. We’re all so grateful to PEARL for hosting us.’

Photo Credit: Luke O'Donovan

A bus stop… a mundane, forlorn shed? Think again!