Remodelling the King Charles Building at the former Royal Naval College, Greenwich, made a new home for the Trinity College of Music. The project consolidated the college’s activities within a single setting, providing new teaching and practice rooms alongside the Jerwood Library.

The grade 1-listed building is a Scheduled Ancient Monument constructed over more than a century from 1664, with elements by England’s most influential Baroque architect, Sir Christopher Wren, and John Webb. It sits within the Maritime Greenwich UNESCO World Heritage Site. Interventions were carefully integrated to support contemporary academic use while respecting the building’s architectural and historic significance.

Facilities ranging from rehearsal rooms and instrument stores to a recording studio and archives had to be accommodated across two wings with markedly different spatial character. A clear and logical plan works with the varied grain to make single floorplates, while restrained treatment of the interiors gives coherence to the whole. Original surfaces are left raw or simply finished, while new fixtures are robust and unfussy. 

On three floors of the west wing, where cabin-bedrooms for naval pensioners once lined both sides of central corridors, more than 80 rooms for teaching and practice appear as freestanding red boxes, tucked behind the white arches of the original structure. In the attic storey, suspended ceilings were stripped away to reveal heavy oak trusses that lend unique character to the Jerwood Library for the Performing Arts.