Lewisham restaurant complex construction could start within weeks
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| Riverdale Hall, via Wikipedia |
Riverdale Hall is an unused facility strapped to Lewisham Shopping Centre, overlooking the Lewisham Gateway building site. The renovation will turn the ground floor, first floor and rooftop into temporary restaurants and bars. Planning company Vectos has just submitted a construction-management proposal to Lewisham, which says:
Vectos has been retained by London Union to prepare a Construction Logistics Plan
associated with the temporary change of use at Riverdale Hall, Lewisham to provide a sui
generis use on ground, first and roof levels to include the provision of restaurants, cafes and
bars, ancillary uses and new entrances.
Construction work is expected to take approximately 4 weeks finishing in late Winter 2015.
The development is most likely to serve as the home of Polpo founder Russell Norman's planned new Lewisham restaurant. Norman is part of London Union. Reader Paul, who sent us the details, writes:
The revised drawings show the layout and size of the space: two big restaurants and some sort of bar on the ground floor, a lounge on the first floor and a bar, restaurant and room for street food trucks on the roof.
Tantalisingly, the very bottom picture showing the frontage of the East entrance has "Pizza Pilgrims" signage! I think we can infer that the other restaurant is going to be the Polpo, given that Russell Norman is involved in London Union and he said it was going to be in "an ugly Sixties building that used to be an OAP drop-in centre" (the building used to be the Leisure Box which had a social centre element I think).
The rooftop element is outlined as a "wine garden" with ambient mood lighting.
