Matt + Fiona

The young designers from prototyping their designs for public realm seating and sculpture for the Regents Park Estate. They’ll be physically building their unique designs this summer, using reclaimed materials from the Reflect pavilion and meanwhile garden, formerly on Hampstead Road.

Brilliant project led by Jess Kendall on our team, in collaboration with Kirsty & Manfredi at for Camden Council

Plans for the weekend? If not why not head to Southbank to enjoy the Architecture Explorers Trail which has popped back up this May half term 🫧🪁🧩🏙️🚧🎢🎈

Thank you .grabowska for the beautiful photos

Welcoming the next chapter of Reflect Pavilion as its young designers reconfigure it into seating & sculpture for the Regent’s Park Estate.

As part of wider landscaping and traffic calming measures taking place in the estate, designed by the young designers from are creating bespoke designs from the reclaimed material that encourage engagement with nature & play.

The designs and now being worked through technical and maintenance requirements with LDA, and we and Fitzrovia Youth in Action will build them in August.

✨ The way light falls across the wall
🏞️ Where to stand at a window to catch the furthest view
🎞️ Peeling back memories in layers of wall paper
🧱 The texture of the walls beneath your finger tips
🌬️ The breezes coming down a chimney
🎼The hum of a home’s daily rhythms

It’s the little things that underpin our connection with our environments, shifting them from detached, abstract spaces to places with meaning & memory.

A series of beautiful, kinetic & poetic models made by the young designers of the Design & Construction Club at Link Road that demonstrate getting to know places in their minutiae through all their senses. And sharing that insider knowledge with others.

These will pave the way to a series of larger installations at the Neighbourhood Public Square this summer that encourage participants and those who experience the installations to get to know the site through all their senses. They will also continue to inform how the brilliant team and the design team continue to approach its design.

Beautiful workshop led by Matt, Daniel Sarah & Parm

We teach children about what they as individuals should be doing to look after the environment… recycling, switching lights off when they leave a room etc. But we rarely teach them about what they should expect from their built environment and the people creating it on their behalf. And yet this is where the greatest impact can be made ✨

So it was fantastic to collaborate with as part of their ongoing schools’ outreach to demonstrate the importance of retrofit and reuse in buildings with Year 8 students at the East Manchester Academy.

The students built 1:20 models, creating a new facade (including insulation!) for an existing building - mirroring the approach Bywater are taking at Fountain Street in Manchester.

CIVIC SQUARE’s Neighbourhood Public Square has gone in for planning so the Design & Construction Club have been creating posters and calls for action for everyone to get involved and have their say.

Head over the to find out more about their beautiful proposals - on every level - for the transformation of a former waste transfer station to a demonstration of regenerative, civic infrastructure at the heart of Ladywood, Birmingham.

Knowing how dense planning applications can be, CIVIC SQUARE have distilled everything as clearly as possible. The Design & Construction Club who collaborate alongside the design team (& over time will be becoming more & more involved) created these powerful posters as an alternative to the tiny A4 flyers usually put up. Maybe they could become a precedent for all planning notices seeing proposals through the eyes of the next generation? ✨

This week we were invited to the House of Lords to speak to their Built Environment Committee on the value of youth engagement in the built environment, and how to make it happen. We presented evidence from the 80 place making projects that have engaged almost 10,000 young people, with a host of incredible local authorities and developers, cultural organisations, schools and youth groups.

Alongside Nicola Rochfort, Head of Engagement & Insights at Grovesnor, and Teresa Strachan, Academic in planning, we presented:

✨ The value to placemakers - the future proofing, better research visioning, the trust building and ultimately often swifter planning timeframes that result

🌱 The value to young people - increased real world learning, problem solving, creativity & skills and the well being that comes from feeling listened to & like you belong

🌍 The value to society - resulting better spaces that are more locally informed, environmentally sensitive and socially just, with the input of people seeing spaces and places exactly as they are, and not through the economic lens of property.

The full session can be viewed at the Parliament TV link in our bio.

Thank you to the House of Lords Built Environment Committee for the invitation (as an aside, for us it demonstrated the value of submitting written evidence to an open call from government - you never know where it will lead.) If you’d told us ten years ago when we first started handing that we’d be speaking on the topic at the House of Lords, we’d have never believed you. We hope this is an indicator of hope across the board and that it heralds tangible policy change.

Looking for something fun to do in London this Easter? The Architecture Explorers Trail reopens today ready for the long weekend. Co-designed by children and families, it encourages you to look afresh at the views and stories of this part of the river Thames & London.

📸 by Pete Woodhead
Joyful project led by Matt and for

💥 What a group of designer-makers!!! 💥

In the latest Design & Construction Club session the young designers stained, upholstered and finished their furniture. The results are stunning and we couldn’t be more proud.

Thank you to the James Cond Centre for hosting us, to the brilliant team for this wonderful collaboration and above all to the amazing members of the Design & Construction Club for pushing the limits again & again ✨

An incredible new children’s cancer centre is underway at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH)

The team at GOSH want to ensure patients and their families are as involved as possible in the design and shaping of these new spaces. Through the visionary we are humbled to be working with past and present patients and young people familiar with the hospital to imagine how some of the spaces could look, and even more importantly, feel.

Here the GOSH Young People’s Forum (YPF) are making space with reclaimed materials from the demolished building, and epic amounts of imagination and ingenuity, on the GOSH Space & Place Day a few weekends ago. The timber nodes are hardwood, reclaimed from the demolished Frontage building, and the colourful wiring is from all the old electrics.

The GOSH YPF is a group of young leaders aged 10 to 21 who support the improvement of patient experience at Great Ormond Street Hospital. Thank you for your generosity in sharing your ideas and imagination.

This temporary installation is a starting point for thinking about what playful sculptures, installations and furniture could be designed and made by young people to ultimately go into the new children’s cancer centre. Watch this space for more pop ups.