Why we love: #1, Brixton East

In an area increasingly and relentlessly busy, the Brixton East gallery provides a welcome sense of church-like calm within its bare walls.

The brick-faced building fronts onto two streets, Barrington Road and Gresham Road. It’s named after the old station (originally called Loughborough Park) that survived from 1866 until its closure in 1976. Today the ticket hall is a photographic studio across the road.

Linger in one of the gallery’s two spacious, and often empty, rooms and consider the history of the place, as natural light streams in from its west-facing windows. It was built in 1871 on land purchased from the London-Brighton and South Coast Railway by furniture dealers John Roycroft and David Dougharty.

In 1922 the property was left to Roycroft’s sisters who continued making furniture. Later they leased it to a Mr H. J. Philips who had a successful business producing wooden packing crates for British Motor Parts.

Stand on the original boarded wooden floor on the first floor, and you’ll see that the brick walls and paintwork remains as it was when packing crates were made decades ago. And don’t forget to look up: it’s double height and vaulted with three skylights in the roof. There’s even a cute terrace out on the roof.

And what of the current show, Third Six? Well, the artist we enjoyed most is Ivo Morrison, who was born on the “banks of the Zambezi” in 1990, and satirizes darker elements of Botswanian domestic policy and high society in his striking paintings (which often feature giraffes).

Also on display are abstract painter Stevie Dix, portraits by Orfeo Tagiuri inspired by the obituaries in Icelandic newpsapers, and Ghanaian artist Robert Badu, a former security guard who creates work from “observing humanity”.

The show runs until October.