LX Factory occupies a block of brick warehouses and machine halls in Alcântara that spent the nineteenth and twentieth centuries making textiles and then printing newspapers, and then stood empty for decades. It reopened in 2008 as a rented complex of studios, shops, galleries and restaurants on one deliberate condition: nothing was cleaned up. Cast iron, freight rails set in the floor, exposed pipework, peeling paint and the machinery itself were all left where they were, and the walls were given to muralists. It is what a factory looks like when nobody has smoothed it over.
The thing that makes it a place rather than a development is directly overhead. The 25 de Abril bridge crosses the site, and its deck carries road and rail high overhead, so a constant low harmonic runs through the whole complex — you hear it before you register what it is. Inside, Ler Devagar occupies an old printing hall with books shelved to the roof and a press still standing among them. A market of vintage and handmade stalls has run in the central lane at weekends in recent years.