What the waterbrought.

Sugar, then tea, then timber, then nothing. The basin was cut in 1802 and worked until 1971, when the last ship left and the gates were welded shut. For thirty years it was a hole full of water that nobody could reach.

The cranes are still standing — four of them, listed, and retained on the Meridian site at the practice’s insistence. They do not work. They were never going to work again. They are there because the building is a newcomer and the cranes are not.

What made this one was the twenty years in between: the boatyard that never left, the chandler on Narrow Street that still sells rope by the metre, the Wednesday market under the viaduct, and a generation of studios that took the cheap warehouse space and stayed once it stopped being cheap.

Meridian sits inside that, not on top of it. The podium is a public room. The garden on the third is private, but the arrival hall is not — it opens onto the quay, and the quay belongs to everybody.