Nicholas Campbell, Rex Wilkinson, Roger Zogolovitch and Piers Gough studied together at the Architectural Association in London between 1965 and 1971.

Nicholas founded Campbell Associates in 1972 often working with his future partners on residential refurbishment, extensions and shopfitting the new wave of London fashion boutiques. But his future partners remained freelancers until, in 1975, they formed a ‘super group’ to take on their first sizeable commission—a major conversion for a top London auction house on the fringe of Notting Hill. CZWG took their first office in a sixth floor Edwardian dome on the edge of Covent Garden, but soon found a derelict four storey workshop in a Smithfield courtyard which they leased and half renovated with a bank loan, moving in with six staff in 1978, much of the space being let to a photographer.

Workload gradually grew from a diet of small domestic conversions and was fed in part by the appearance on the market of repossessed commercial buildings in Central London.

These were architecturally very appealing to a growing group of the avant garde—
artists, designers, musicians and actors who had seen, heard of, or otherwise desired a New York Loft in order to experience a different kind of city living and working; in vast, raw, sub-industrial spaces.

The practice became founding architects of the loft ‘movement’, not only doing the architecture but finding suitable buildings and helping set up co-operatives to buy them, and fighting an outdated planning philosophy to get a change of use. They even pioneered the Design Studio use with Camden Council before the introduction of the generalized Business Use class in 1982. This was very much an interior architecture, but working with the spare but stylish palette of that turn-of-the-century transitional period of commercial buildings incubated their own ‘post decorative’ style. Much later in 2000, CZWG’s Glass Building, in a very different style, was the first purpose-built new loft building to emerge in Camden.

A second stream of work evolved from a change in attitude to living in the city. A new generation was shunning the suburbs and making for the centre where the Victorian terraced house dominated while house builders were beginning to realize that an equally centrally located attractive modern alternative could be as desirable. Hence from small beginnings in Hackney, the firm embarked on a long involvement with the contemporary dwelling.

The regeneration of London’s docklands, begun in 1980, moved the city’s centre eastwards and a different scale of brown-field site, often edged by the Thames, demanded a different architecture of dwelling. The practice rediscovered the multi-storey apartment building for private occupation and because of the sheer scale of sites, developed a skill for the relative positioning of building, the importance of streets and views – a skill vital to the reemerging art of ‘master planning’.

The regeneration of Docklands liberated the warehouse for new uses, and with the firm’s experience of turning redundant commercial buildings into ‘lofts’ the two streams came together in one location—the emerging new heart of East London.

At a now ‘mere’ twenty storeys, Cascades on the Isle of Dogs was its marker, but the architectural boundaries were most remarkably stretched at China Wharf —a bold red seven storeys half surrounded by the listed warehouses.

The number of staff in the practice was growing fast and in 1986 CZWG bought a redundant factory in Clerkenwell and redeveloped it in two stages to house a staff of seventy. The move coincided with an exhibition of their work in a bold installation at the RIBA Heinz Gallery in 1988 —‘English Extremists’.

The practice has always had a relationship with the Art world, and exhibition and gallery design was not new to them— Lutyens at the Hayward, Alfred Gilbert at the Royal Academy— and their capability in permanent gallery design had been recognized in its sadly unsuccessful inclusions in competitions for the National Gallery Sainsbury Wing and the National Gallery of Scotland. However, success followed in being commissioned in 1996 to remodel the galleries showing Victorian, Early 20th Century and Regency periods at the National Portrait Gallery.