captures a personal and sensory encounter with the long-abandoned interior of Poplar Baths in East London. At the time, the building stood in a state of quiet suspension—awaiting renewal, yet still alive with traces of its past. Walking through it felt like stepping into a memory, where echoes of former lives lingered in every dusty corner.
This project explores how places like this can speak to us—not through words, but through the atmosphere they hold. The textures, the light, the decay—these elements came together to create an emotional landscape, drawing out an unexpected connection between body, space, and history. It reminded me that buildings aren’t just made of bricks and mortar. They hold stories. They breathe, in their own way.
Poplar Baths, located on East India Dock Road, has a rich and layered history. Public baths had been on the site since 1852, with the current building opening in 1933. Over the years, it wasn’t just a place to swim or bathe—it became a community hub, transforming into a cinema, dance hall, and even an exhibition space during the winter months. It was damaged by bombs during World War II, repaired, reopened, and eventually closed for good in 1988 as times and priorities changed. The encounter described here took place before its more recent renovation into a modern leisure centre.
At first glance, the interior was a scene of abandonment—peeling paint, shattered glass, damp air, and scattered debris. Some parts had been vandalised; others bore the marks of hasty and ill-fated renovations. But amid the decay, something stirred. The atmosphere was thick with memory. Slowly, details began to surface—the elegant bevels of a ceiling, the soft sheen of slate-blue tiles, traces of chrome and mosaic under layers of dust. As I moved through the space, I could almost hear the echoes: laughter in the baths, footsteps in the hall, music drifting across a dance floor on a winter night.
And then came a moment of revelation. A narrow, dim corridor opened into a vast, sunlit room framed by sweeping arches and tall windows: the old swimming pool. Empty, still, majestic. Light poured in, catching particles in the air. Standing on the floor of the drained pool felt surreal—strangely peaceful. I could almost picture ghostly swimmers gliding past.
That encounter—between decaying space and vivid imagination—created a kind of resonance. Time blurred. The past seeped into the present, and the space came alive in ways that were both physical and emotional. The dust, the architecture, the air itself—everything held a kind of memory, an ambiance that reached out and lingered. In that moment, the ruin wasn’t just about loss or neglect. It was a portal into something deeper: the invisible threads that tie people, places, and time together.
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Mace, Valérie (2016) Residual Ambiances - An Illustration of Urban heritage as a Sentient Experience. Ambiances. tomorrow. 3rd International Congress on Ambiances., University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece.