Trinity Buoy Wharf is the Thameside site where all the buoys and markers for the River Thames were once made and repaired. The site was rescued from dereliction and now its lighthouse (the only one in the capital) overlooks a growing creative community.
Preserving the Grade II-listed warehouses, the developers built the brightly coloured Container City, creating artists' studios, offices and a riverside café out of recycled shipping containers, and forged relationships with London's art colleges, whose students are delighted to have access to the site's large spaces for ambitious projects. ENO make all their props there, the Princes Drawing School have their Foundation Year Art School there and there are a host of other creative tenants. The fleet of Thames Clippers is also based at the Wharf – at one of London's longest piers, made almost entirely from recycled materials.
Also on the site are a nostalgic '40s food joint, FatBoy's Diner, and what may be London's smallest museum, The Faraday Project. Housed in a tiny wooden hut, it's devoted to the Victorian scientist Michael Faraday who conducted experiments into electric lighting in the lighthouse in 1863.
Today the lighthouse is an unusual art venue (open to the public at weekends, 11am-5pm in summer, 11am-4pm in winter), hosting Jem Finer's 'Longplayer', a digital musical composition, commisioned by Artangel and designed to play in real-time, without repetition, for a millennium. An installation by Ingrid Hu of 234 singing bowls is part of a 66ft-wide instrument used on occasion to perform a section of 'Longplayer' live.