They asked for 80 homes – she gave them 157! Council-housing miracle named Britain’s best new building
If Andy Burnham is looking for inspiration for his great “council housebuilding comeback”, he would do well to visit Croydon. There, nestled into a steeply sloping site, sheltered by a canopy of mature trees, stands a cluster of crystalline pink and brown brick towers, where generous flats look on to a landscape of allotments, playgrounds and to the rolling hills of south London beyond. Designed by Mary Duggan Architects, with Ruff Architects, it is a model of council-led housebuilding – so much so that it has also been named this year’s best building in the UK, confounding the bookies’ outsider odds.
Only once before has the RIBA Stirling prize ever been awarded to a council housing project, when Goldsmith Street in Norwich scooped the gong in 2019, for its rows of low-energy brick terraces, designed by Mikhail Riches Architects and Cathy Hawley. This year’s winner, Lion Green Road in Coulsdon, is an entirely different animal, and it puts a welcome spotlight back on housing design at a time when the government plans to pump £39bn into the sector. It is also a bittersweet vindication of Croydon council’s erstwhile housebuilding company, Brick by Brick, a bold and sadly brief experiment by the previous Labour administration, which was halted in 2020 when the council went bankrupt, seeing numerous projects cancelled.
“At a time when we urgently need to deliver more homes,” says RIBA president, Chris Williamson, “Lion Green Road shows that density can be achieved without compromising the quality of the places we create. Through a consistent specification, with subtle variation in height and orientation, it offers housing at scale without uniformity.”
Burnham’s first allocation of £10bn, announced in August, is planned to kickstart 70,000 affordable homes across the country. Yet few people in Britain welcome the prospect of new housing in their backyards, even if it’s prize-winning. The planning application for Lion Green Road, submitted in 2017, received 18 letters of support and 257 objections, mostly about the loss of parking. Now built, almost a decade later, the project demonstrates how more homes than you might imagine can be constructed on the most unpromising of sites in a sympathetic way, without sacrificing greenery, views and public access – and keeping plenty of parking, too.
“We really pushed against the suburban model of terraces dominated by cars, with little front and back gardens,” says Duggan. The original brief asked for 80 homes, arranged as she describes, but Duggan proved she could fit 157 flats, distributed between five pavilion-like towers, retaining the mature trees and bluebell woodland on the site. The result feels like it has grown out of its woodland setting, with a public route that winds its way through the site, up to a historic railway embankment at the rear, and not a perimeter fence in sight.
“Brick by Brick was an amazing client,” says Duggan, who also had a small mews project in Crystal Palace on the drawing board for the council’s housebuilder, before the plug was pulled. “It was a refreshing change from how private developers think about affordable housing. Here, they weren’t talking about the land as a commodity, but as a genuinely public asset.”
The council cared about the interior spaces, too. Thanks to the “pinwheel” plan of the blocks, with flats radiating outwards from a central lift core, each home is dual aspect, maximising natural light, cross-ventilation and views. The flats all enjoy an inset loggia balcony, with a bulge at the base of the balustrades to accommodate plant pots, while cuts in the form (to preserve historic views) create some with larger roof terraces. In the interests of efficiency, the five towers all have the same star-shaped plan, but each is subtly rotated to reduce direct overlooking between neighbouring homes, enabling the buildings to stand close together without sacrificing privacy. Half of the flats are private rental, in two towers, while half are affordable, in three blocks retained by the council, rented at local housing allowance rates. Unlike the Norwich project, this is not true social housing.
The RIBA judges describe the project as a “new kind of garden neighbourhood”. The space between the blocks feels consciously planned, rather than a leftover afterthought, designed with landscape architecture practice Planit-IE to include a sensory garden, allotment plots and play areas. Walking around the development’s zig-zagging slopes and stepped pathways gives the feeling of exploring a bucolic hill town. Little bug hotels in the same faceted star-shaped form as the towers are a delightful touch; even the insects get a dignified dwelling.
Duggan says the project “expands the idea of the threshold”, and the arrival feels more welcoming than most. The entrance of each block is framed by a paved terrace, with seating and planting, while all have generous lobbies, no matter the tenure. It’s a far cry from the “poor door” apartheid of so much developer-built housing, where private owners get the hotel concierge treatment, while affordable tenants enter around the back by the bins. It all oozes quality on a budget, down to the choice of three dusty colours of brick, some projecting to create a textured, tweedy finish. The quality belies the tight construction budget of £2,500/sq metre – making it the cheapest project on the shortlist by far. Other Stirling Prize contenders this year included two exquisitely built projects for well-heeled Cambridge colleges, a large private house in Essex, an arts centre in Hertford, and an £825m office block in Paddington.
If there is a cloud hanging over Croydon’s triumph, it is the fate of Brick by Brick. It was established in 2015, as a wholly council-owned company, because the conventional development model was failing to deliver enough affordable homes. The idea was that Croydon would use its own land, often small leftover sites, and borrow against its own resources, to build a mix of private and affordable housing, while turning a profit for the public purse. But the sites often proved to be trickier than expected, adding additional costs, while the financial forecasts were overly optimistic, with Brexit and Covid introducing huge delays. Housing experts attribute its collapse to poor financial structuring, governance and risk management, rather than a failure in development expertise or quality of delivery.
Nonetheless, Brick by Brick built 751 homes, over half of which are affordable, of a design quality higher than most standard developer fare. With renewed housing cash from central government, might there be a chance for some of the halted schemes to be resurrected, and more of the imagination and innovation of Lion Green Road spread across the borough and beyond?