The Yard

The ground floor is for production. It houses our workshop, glazing lab, tumbling and polishing room; the rooms where frames are cut, shaped, pinned, glazed, adjusted and repaired. A place for tools, benches, trays, lenses, acetate dust, screws, heat, polish and repetition.

The first floor is for our team. A studio, office, commercial kitchen, communal dining space, creative room, frame archive and model store. It is designed for proximity. Not just to make working together easier, but to make it unavoidable. Better ideas tend to travel by overheard conversation, not calendar invitation.

The second floor is for learning. A dedicated academy, built to train the next generation of spectacle makers, opticians, technicians and people who know how things are made. Spectacles are small objects, but making them properly requires a large amount of accumulated knowledge. The Yard gives that knowledge somewhere to live.

The building has been designed with 51 Architecture, with colours by Simon March. It has been photographed by Felix Speller. But it is not meant to be over-designed. It is meant to be used.

There is concrete underfoot. Exposed services overhead. Functional spaces, practical materials, useful light. A building where production is not hidden away, but brought to the front. A place where customers can see that spectacles are not simply bought, but made.

You can visit us for while-you-wait and same-day glazing, adjustments and repairs, bespoke consultations, eye examinations and spectacle-making classes. You can see frames being worked on, lenses being edged, repairs being carried out, and the ordinary labour behind a well-made pair of spectacles.

The Yard occupies 6 Blundell Street, a former nineteenth-century stable block in the industrial backlands of King’s Cross.

The building formed part of the Brewery Road vinegar brewery complex, associated with Crosse and Blackwell. The brewery stood in the area now bounded by Brewery Road, Blundell Street and the surrounding yards. It was part of Belle Isle, a district known for practical, industrial and often noxious trades: breweries, factories, depots, yards, stables and workshops.

6 Blundell Street was originally built as stabling for the brewery. This explains both the form of the building and the name we have given it. It was arranged around an open yard: a working court used for movement, loading, waiting, harnessing, deliveries and daily brewery logistics. It was not originally a sealed office or warehouse, but a service building for animals, vehicles and labour.

Horses were central to the operation of a large nineteenth-century brewery. Before motor vehicles, they were the brewery’s distribution network. Heavy horses pulled drays loaded with barrels, casks, bottles, raw materials and by-products. They moved goods between the brewery, local suppliers, railway depots, public houses, shops and customers. A brewery of this size needed not just brewing vessels and production space, but stables, tack rooms, feed storage, washing areas, farriery, yard space and men to care for the horses.

The yard was therefore not incidental. It was infrastructure.

The Brewery Road vinegar brewery was a substantial industrial site. Local-history records describe it as dating from 1876, later extensively rebuilt in 1881, and destroyed by fire in 1907. It reportedly contained one of the largest vinegar vats in the world, with a capacity of 115,000 gallons. That figure gives a sense of the scale of the operation: this was not a small backstreet concern, but a major piece of London food manufacturing infrastructure.

Crosse and Blackwell were best known as makers of pickles, sauces and preserved foods. Vinegar was essential to that world. It was not simply a condiment, but an industrial ingredient: a preserving agent, a flavouring, and a core part of the nineteenth-century food trade. A vinegar brewery of this size would have depended on the regular movement of raw materials in and finished product out. Horses made that possible.

The building’s stable origin also explains its robust, utilitarian character. Stable buildings needed hard-wearing surfaces, generous openings, ventilation, drainage, access to the yard and enough structural strength to support constant movement and use.

They were designed for work rather than display. Their value lay in adaptability, durability and proximity to the main industrial operation.


By the late twentieth century, the original industrial use had disappeared. The building was converted in 1990 from a nineteenth-century stable block, with an atrium inserted into the former mews yard. In later years it was used as a commercial building, including by Quarto Publishers, before becoming Cubitts’ new headquarters and manufactory.

Its current use restores something of its original purpose. The Yard is once again a place organised around making, movement, tools, repair and daily labour. The horses have gone, but the logic of the building remains: a working court, with production at its centre.
Today, the ground floor is dedicated to spectacle production, with the workshop, glazing lab, tumbling and polishing room. The first floor houses the studio, office, commercial kitchen, communal dining space, creative space, frame archive and model store. The second floor is dedicated to learning, with a dedicated academy.

The history of 6 Blundell Street is therefore not just that it is an old industrial building. More specifically, it is a former stable block built to support a large vinegar brewery. It was part of the hidden logistical machinery of London: the place where horses, carts, goods and people made industry work.

That is why The Yard is the right name.
It describes the building’s past. And it describes what we want it to be again: a practical, open, working place.

“The spot that holds the horse slaughter houses is modestly called "The Vale;" the first turning beyond is, with goblin like humour, designated "Pleasant Grove." It is hardly too much to say, that almost every trade banished from the haunts of men, on account of the villainous smells and the dangerous atmosphere which it engenders is represented in Pleasant Grove.

There are bone boilers, fat-melters, "chemical works," firework makers, lucifer-match factories, and several most extensive and flourishing dust yards, where - at this delightful season so excellent for ripening corn - scores of women and young girls find employment in sifting the refuse of dust-bins, standing knee-high in what they sift.

According to British History Online, the enterprises located at Belle Isle include the following:

• Tilekilns (Adams, later Tylor’s) 
• Coach and Cart Grease Factory (Warner’s) 
• Chemical Laboratory (Margett’s) 
• Varnish Factory (Wallis & Sons, also Schweizer’s, Turner’s and others 
• Soap-Boiling (Adams again) 
• Enamel Black and Japanning Blood Manure (Fretwell’s) Fat Melting 
• Gut-Scraping (Sausage Skins) 
• Condemned Meat Processing

Pierre Henri Baume was a reformer, eccentric, and early social experimenter whose story sits somewhere between utopian idealism and Victorian scandal. Born in Marseille and later naturalised in Britain, Baume arrived with wealth, mystery, and a reputation shaped by rumours of espionage and royal service in Naples. But rather than simply live as a gentleman of means, he became drawn to the radical social ideas of Robert Owen and earned the nickname “The Reforming Optimist.” 

In north London, Baume attempted to put those ideals into practice. Behind Belle Isle in Holloway, he founded the Experimental Gardens: a small community intended to give working artisans and labourers the chance to live with greater independence. He leased plots of land, offered affordable loans, and encouraged residents to build cottages with adjoining gardens for subsistence and self-reliance. By 1851, the gardens were home to 48 families. 

Yet Baume’s life was never far from controversy. Locals called the area Frenchman’s Island, while the press branded him the “Islington Monster”, seizing on his foreignness, his unconventional politics, and his unusual way of life. He was said to live frugally, survive largely on peas, keep bundles of banknotes in his coat, patrol the gardens at night with a pistol, and later rent a railway arch for his pet monkey. 
The Experimental Gardens did not last. Under pressure from London’s rapid expansion, the land was sold to developers and the community had disappeared by 1853. Baume lived until 1875, leaving his estate for philanthropic purposes on the Isle of Man. His legacy remains a fascinating glimpse of a forgotten London: part social experiment, part urban oddity, and part reminder that radical ideas often begin in unlikely places. 

The idea behind The Yard was to begin with the building itself.

6 Blundell Street is not a single, pure architectural object. It is layered. At its core is the original Victorian stable building, built around an open yard to serve the Brewery Road vinegar brewery. Around and above that sits a later twentieth-century postmodern intervention, including the enclosed atrium that now forms the centre of the building.

Over time, much of the building’s character had been concealed. Brick was covered. Structure was hidden. Surfaces were painted, boxed in, softened or made anonymous. Our approach was to reverse that process: to remove layers rather than add them. To strip the building back and expose its underlying structure, materials and history.

That starts in the atrium.

The former yard has been stripped back and turned into our frame-making workshop. It is the working heart of the building: a place of benches, tools, acetate, machinery and making. Custom cabinetry by Lozzy Studios sits within the original volume, designed to support the practical needs of spectacle production while keeping the workshop open, visible and central.

The colour palette is drawn from the building’s existing materials: Victorian red brick, exposed concrete, plywood, mahogany, galvanised metal, chrome and the muted tones of workshop machinery. The aim was not to impose a new identity on the building, but to draw out what was already there.

The central staircase, once a monolithic painted object, has been stripped back through many layers of paint to reveal the concrete beneath. Rather than disguise its mass, the intervention makes it more honest: a piece of late twentieth-century structure set against the older brickwork of the stable building.

Above the atrium, on the first floor, is the communal dining area. This is one of the most important spaces in The Yard. It has been furnished with custom plywood furniture, allowing the whole team to gather, eat and spend time together. It is intended as a practical expression of the building’s purpose: bringing people into proximity, sharing knowledge, and making work feel collective rather than dispersed.

The internal garden sits alongside this, using a dense arrangement of ferns and sculptural planting to create a striking green counterpoint to the brick, concrete and plywood. It softens the industrial character of the atrium without domesticating it.

On the west wing of the ground floor is the glazing lab. This is where we glaze Zeiss lenses to order, using state-of-the-art machinery in a clear production room. Customers and visitors can see the process: lenses being edged, checked, fitted and finished. As with the workshop, the point is to make production visible rather than hidden.

The west wing is also home to the Lawrence Jenkin Workshop: a workshop within a workshop. It is named for Lawrence Jenkin, a spectacle maker of more than sixty years, and the first person to teach our founder the traditional art of spectacle making. It gives traditional making a permanent place within the building, alongside newer machinery and production systems.

The east wing of the ground floor is dedicated to the team and to the practical workings of the building. It includes the bike store, showers, cooling and changing areas, tumbling barrels, polishing machines and acetate stores. These are not secondary spaces. They are part of the working logic of The Yard: the infrastructure that allows people, materials and objects to move through the building properly.

At the very centre of the building is the consultation room. It is clad in mahogany and furnished with vintage modernist Italian furniture, a Noguchi lamp and chrome fittings. The room takes inspiration from the Kaufmann Office: warm, precise, private and slightly ceremonial. It is a place for slower conversations, bespoke consultations and the more intimate work of understanding what a customer needs.

The first floor contains the main supporting areas of the business. On the east side is the office, where our support teams work. On the west side is the creative space and model store, furnished with reclaimed and vintage pieces, including furniture in the spirit of Robin Day, Vitsoe shelving, vintage kilims and other modernist references. These spaces are intended to be useful rather than polished: places for design, planning, archiving, conversation and the everyday work of running the company.

The second floor is dedicated to training, learning and development. At its centre is the Academy Room, a space for teaching the next generation of spectacle makers, opticians, technicians and Cubitts people. It reflects a simple belief: craft only survives if it is taught deliberately.

The second floor also opens onto the roof garden, inspired by the work of Luis Barragán. It brings colour, light and stillness to the top of the building, in contrast to the industrial character below.

Taken together, The Yard is a building of three connected ideas.

First, making: the workshop, glazing lab, tumbling, polishing and acetate stores.
Second, togetherness: the atrium, dining area, garden, office and creative spaces.

Third, learning: the Academy Room, Lawrence Jenkin Workshop and the daily sharing of practical knowledge across the building.

It is not an office with a workshop attached. It is a manufactory, with a company gathered around it.