Virtual Assembly is an interactive digital model of the Old Kent Road Mosque and the Muslim Association of Nigeria UK (MANUK), developed as a practice-led research project in response to the mosque's demolition and redevelopment. The project investigates how digital spatial modelling and collaborative storytelling function as research methods that preserve embodied memory, sustain cultural continuity, and generate new forms of collective reflection for migrant faith communities.
Prior to demolition, the entire building is LiDAR scanned to produce a high-resolution three-dimensional record of the site. This dataset forms the basis of an interactive model that integrates site-responsive films of congregational prayer with recorded stories and personal testimonies from mosque members. Rather than serving as documentation alone, the model operates as a performative research environment, enabling participants to navigate and re-experience the spatial and social life of the mosque. Developed in collaboration with the congregation, the system's navigation, scale, and interaction design are shaped by religious practice and social custom so that the digital environment reflects patterns of everyday inhabitation. In this way, interface design becomes culturally situated and methodologically embedded within community knowledge. The platform therefore functions as an experiential archive that foregrounds lived experience and embodied forms of knowing. It demonstrates how space, material culture, and ritual practice actively produce belonging and identity, while offering new modes of engaging both tangible and intangible heritage within London's longest-established Nigerian Muslim community during a period of transition.
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Prototype versions of the model are tested through public exhibitions at Ambika P3, where large-scale projections enable congregation members to explore the virtual environment collectively and assess its spatial accuracy and cultural resonance. Structured feedback sessions inform subsequent iterations, embedding evaluation and co-production within the research process itself. Participant reflections indicate the model's capacity to reactivate spatial memory and reconnect individuals to shared histories. As one member observes: "The work showed the limitation of human memory; I realised I had already forgotten many of my embedded memories within this space… the feeling of walking down a particular step or the bit of carpet where I usually pray. I walk to the parts which mean the most to me." Through these iterative and collaborative processes, Virtual Assembly demonstrates how digital environments extend beyond archival representation to operate as active sites of memory, encounter, and communal continuity. Rather than treating heritage as fixed and preservable, the project conceptualises it as a living, participatory practice that is continually produced through collective engagement. As a proof of concept, the work translates principles of site-integrity into digital space, evidencing the methodological viability of collaboratively authored, community-driven models while surfacing new technical and epistemological questions for future research.
