Pearce+ Builds a Guerrilla Shading Pavilion in Camden From Reused Timber

London studio Pearce+ has put up a small timber shading pavilion in Camden to make a simple point: shade is easy to make, and the UK needs much more of it. The Guerrilla Shading Pavilion was commissioned by the Camden Inspire festival and stands at the Camden Collective charity in north London.

“We wanted to show that shade can be practical, playful and beautiful,” founder Owen Pearce told Dezeen. “Making shade doesn’t need to be expensive or complicated.”

A hexagon assembled from five parts

The pavilion is a six sided structure made of five prefabricated trapezoid sections that were put together on site. Every piece of timber came from earlier Pearce+ projects. Slatted walls cast shade over a small room inside, and the frame doubles as a fixing point for large sheets of fabric, which can be stretched out to form a wider shaded roof.

Why the shading pavilion asks for shade as infrastructure

The studio developed the project with the campaign group Shade The UK. “Shade is one of the simplest ways to make our increasingly hot environments more bearable, yet it’s remarkably overlooked in the UK,” Pearce said. He argued that the country tends to forget about hot summers as soon as the weather turns, and that shade should be treated as “essential infrastructure, not a seasonal luxury”, through planning policy as well as by people acting for themselves.

Finished by festival visitors

Pearce+ deliberately left the lower parts of the walls open. During the festival, visitors finished them by weaving donated fabric through the timber frame, turning the structure into a shared piece of work. The idea feeds the studio’s wider Guerrilla Shading initiative, which encourages people to add shade to their own streets and public spaces.