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# Lightship 95: The Recording Studio Built Inside a Ship
- URL: https://www.unknowndivide.com/lightship-95-the-recording-studio-built-inside-a-ship/
- Published: 2026-08-04T16:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-16T16:31:18.000Z
- Author: unknowndivide staff
- Tags: gear, culture, music, tech, design

Ben Phillips spent four years failing to find the right building for a recording studio. He looked at an old auction house, a nineteenth-century morgue, a church, an ex-tool-hire shop, and rejected all of them, not because the spaces were wrong but because the whole model was wrong: conventional tenancies, solicitors, surveyors, planners, the slow grinding machinery of getting permission to do anything interesting with a building in London. So he stopped looking at buildings. While inspecting an old coaster moored on the River Medway in Kent, he noticed a decommissioned lightship for sale nearby and, by his own account, knew almost nothing about lightships but was immediately taken with it, an intimidating, riveted steel hull topped by a huge red light tower. That impulse became [Lightship 95](https://milocostudios.com/studios/lightship-95/intro/?ref=unknowndivide.com), a working recording studio built into the hull of a 1939 Trinity House vessel, now moored at [Trinity Buoy Wharf](https://www.trinitybuoywharf.com/?ref=unknowndivide.com) in East London's docklands.

The ship itself has a pedigree most studios can't claim. It was built in Portsmouth in 1939, commissioned by Trinity House, the five-hundred-year-old maritime organization chartered under Henry VIII to maintain lighthouses and lightvessels around the British coast. It's one of the last surviving examples of an all-riveted steel lightship, tough enough to survive decades of open-water collisions and now classified as a heritage vessel. None of that made it easier to convert. Below deck, Phillips found a maze of bulkheads, ducts, redundant machinery, and, in the bow and stern compartments, more than 100 cubic meters of spray foam left over from when the ship was automated in the 1980s. Before any studio work could begin, he and his crew had to cut and hand-winch out over 12 tonnes of steel, working without a level surface anywhere on the ship, solving one structural problem only to uncover the next.

What emerged from that process is unusual by any studio's standard. The control room, a 300 square foot space now daylit through four portholes, used to be a diesel fuel tank; the live room, 520 square feet with a high ceiling and genuinely excellent acoustics, used to be the engine room, later split by two double-height bulkheads. Because a quarter-inch riveted steel hull is superb at blocking airborne sound but terrible at damping mechanical resonance, Phillips had to build both rooms as entirely independent floating structures, suspended on neoprene mounts so that a drum kit hammering away in the live room can't be heard in the cabins immediately behind it, or anywhere out on deck. The whole conversion, split between the Medway and the final mooring in London, took a little over a year and a half.

What's on the ship now backs up the ambition of the build. The control room is built around a Calrec S2 console, ATC SCM45A monitors, and a collection of preamps and outboard from Neve, API, Empirical Labs, Universal Audio, and Manley. The live room's microphone collection runs through RCA, Neumann, and Coles, and the backline includes a wall of Fender amps, a set of vintage Ludwig drums, a Wurlitzer, an upright piano, and a Hammond organ with a Leslie cabinet, alongside a large isolation booth and a built-in reverb chamber that most studios would need a much bigger budget to fake. Phillips ran the studio himself for eight years before handing it to new owners; it's now operated as part of the [Miloco](https://milocostudios.com/?ref=unknowndivide.com) group, the same company that partners with Flood and Alan Moulder on Battery Studios across town.

The setting does as much work as the gear. Trinity Buoy Wharf is home to Container City, a cluster of brightly painted studios and offices built from stacked shipping containers, London's only lighthouse, a scattering of public art installations, an American diner, and unbroken views across the Thames docklands. It's the kind of place a band ends up almost by accident and then can't stop talking about, and the client list bears that out: [black midi](https://bmblackmidi.com/?ref=unknowndivide.com) recorded there during the Windmill-scene years that produced some of the most structurally unruly guitar music in Britain, while [Ezra Collective](https://ezracollective.com/?ref=unknowndivide.com), [Nubya Garcia](https://nubyagarcia.com/?ref=unknowndivide.com), and the wider London jazz resurgence that also includes Kokoroko and Moses Boyd found a live room loose enough to track a full band playing off each other in real time. [Loyle Carner](https://loylecarner.com/?ref=unknowndivide.com) and [The Streets](https://thestreets.co.uk/?ref=unknowndivide.com) have both worked there too, alongside acts as different as [The Kills](https://thekills.tv/?ref=unknowndivide.com) and Goat Girl, a spread that says less about any one genre than about what the room itself invites: a place built by cutting apart a lightvessel with a hand winch was never going to produce anything that sounded like it came out of a clinical booking-agency box.

There's a version of this story about a studio, and there's the more interesting version, about what happens when someone refuses the easy path into a rented building and instead spends a year and a half tearing 12 tonnes of steel out of a boat because he wanted a room with actual character in it. Phillips built Lightship 95 to avoid the sterile, doctor's-surgery feel he'd found in newer studios, and the artists who've since made records inside a converted Trinity House lightvessel moored at the edge of the Thames suggest he got exactly what he was after.