Unit/38

Unit 38 is an architectural cooperative offering design services and technical aid to working-class, migrant and racialised communities excluded from processes of urban change. The website was designed to reflect the cooperative's values: accessible, direct and community-facing, providing a clear platform for an organisation working at the intersection of architecture, social justice and community organising.

Unit 38 takes its name from its first office above Pretty Nails, a nail salon inside Seven Sisters Indoor Market at Wards Corner, Tottenham. Beginning in 2018 with the Wards Corner Community Plan, the cooperative has grown from that founding collaboration into a practice with a distinctive approach to community-led design. Rather than moving through conventional sequential RIBA stages, Unit 38 works flexibly, organising communities, developing briefs, negotiating leases and fundraising simultaneously, responding to available resources and shifting priorities.

Central to their work is bridging what they call the feasibility gap: the circular barrier between community ambitions and their delivery, where accessing funding requires technical support, and accessing technical support requires funding. Unit 38 steps into that gap, providing affordable support throughout all stages of development while building lasting knowledge and resilience within communities.

Their services span community plans and resident-led design briefs, architectural drawings and planning applications, retrofit and low-carbon design strategies, and funding and capacity-building support. Rooted in the tradition of Community Technical Aid Centres that emerged in the late 1970s, and largely dismantled from the 1980s onwards, Unit 38 is working to revive that vital social infrastructure for a new generation.