It’s not often that construction, teaching and cinema come together on a single project – but that is certainly the case with the new London Screen Academy in Highbury, north London. The building is still under construction but when complete it will become a new specialist sixth form-only free school for 1,000 16- to 19-year-olds, providing training in film and television, as well as a conventional educational curriculum.

The school is funded and run by the Department for Education (DfE) and developed by LocatED, the government-owned property company creating school places. LSA was created by a group of founders comprising top media names at Working Title, the creator of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually, Heyday Films, best known for Harry Potter, EON which is behind the James Bond films and one of the producers of the Last King of Scotland.

The building in question is Ladbroke House, a four-storey brick building a stone’s throw away from Arsenal football club’s Emirates ground. It was built in the 1930s as a factory facility for radio and television manufacturer AC Cossor, the first in fact to start selling TVs to the public and so a prophetic forerunner to the building’s future role. By 1937, the owners of Ladbroke House claimed that it was “the “largest self-contained radio factory in the British Empire.” 

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