Forest Road has won a Completed Scheme Award in the 2025 Housing Design Awards. 

Forest Road provides 90 affordable one-bedroom homes for local first-time buyers in Walthamstow, on a prominent site opposite Lloyd Park and the William Morris Gallery — the Grade II* listed former home of the Arts and Crafts activist. The building achieves a high density of affordable housing within a predominantly low-rise context, with sensitivity to neighbouring terraced housing. A third of the homes were sold off-plan within five months, reflecting high demand for affordable, community-oriented housing in the area. Almost 50% of the homes have been sold to people who live or work in the borough. Features include large floor to ceiling windows for maximum daylight, ample storage, continuous flooring throughout main living spaces and sensible room proportions. Communal spaces have been integrated into the design to foster a sense of community and wellbeing. Two roof terraces with park views, a south-facing communal courtyard and a lobby area serve as welcoming, shared environments where residents can relax and socialise. 

Congratulations to Gort Scott Associate Sela-Jaymes Taylor on her recent accreditation as a Specialist Conservation Architect.

This achievement builds on her leadership of our Heritage and Retrofit Group and her praised work on numerous historic buildings and structures, including those at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and 3 Mills Studios, with the latter earning her a shortlisting for the 2024 MJ Long Prize. Currently, Sela is utilising her expertise on complex refurbishment heritage projects, such as transforming the Grade II listed Woolwich Old Town Hall & Library into artist studios and reimagining the Vestry House Museum in Walthamstow. Additionally, she is overseeing a significant expansion of the Grade II* listed Girton College, Cambridge.

Sela’s accreditation exemplifies thoughtful heritage stewardship, creating dialogue between historic architectural fabric and contemporary community needs through sensitive intervention and adaptive reuse.

This summer we’re undertaking significant improvements to our Bermondsey office, including enhanced acoustics and switching to air source heat pumps to provide the building with a more sustainable heating and cooling source, in addition to a new roof terrace featuring PV panels and bio-diverse planting with views across the City.

The terrace will also serve as a social area for our studio community, providing space for team gatherings and events that strengthen our collaborative practice.

Our retrofitted office is self-designed to support our collaborative and social studio culture: An opportunity to live out our values and commitment to retrofit.

The original three-storey warehouse dates from the end of the 19th Century. The building had retained its commercial use but fell into a state of disrepair. Following a reuse and retrofit approach, we chose to sensitively repair and optimise the existing building over demolition and re-build. During strip out, we revealed the original striking red brick under poor-quality black render. The original structure was restored, and the ad hoc top floor volume was replaced and extended using matching brick to form a cohesive, bold building. Read about the project here.
 

We are proud to support Young City Makers, Open City’s brilliant initiative that pairs architecture practices with primary schools to bring spatial learning to life through collaboration and hands-on model-making. Our team partnered with Lyon Park Primary in Brent to deliver a series of workshops to Year 6 students, centred around this year’s theme: ‘Play’.

The workshops began by asking students “How can we make our spaces more playful?” - sparking conversations and drawings that became the foundation for hands-on model-making sessions where ideas took three-dimensional form. The workshops were followed by a field trip across the Kings Cross masterplan, exploring the inclusion and design of playful spaces in the public realm.

The programme culminated in an awards ceremony at Brent Civic Centre, where students invited their parents and teachers to show all models out on display. Awards were given for Landscaping, 3D modelling, Creativity, Engineering, Community and the Overall ‘Champions of Play’. 

It was our pleasure to collaborate with such creative and enthusiastic students!’

Thank you to the Gort Scott team: Megan Thacker-Brooks, Fraser Leach-Smith, Pamela Snow and Ameli Vidanearachchi for their work in organising such thoughtful workshops.

Our client, The Portman Estate, hosted a Supplier Charter event last week at One Great Cumberland Place, the location of our new office fit-out project. Project Architect Joe Mac Mahon was invited to present insights into the design process, focusing on key sustainability drivers and achievements.

We collaborated with Bioregional throughout the project to ensure the office fit-out was as sustainable as possible. The project aims to set a benchmark for other commercial developments across The Portman Estate in Marylebone and London’s West End.

Joe shared positive lessons learned about green products, sustainable processes, and creating new, inclusive working environments—achievements to be proud of.

Jess Daly from Bioregional also presented the Estate’s One Planet Living strategy developed specifically for this fit-out to achieve carbon neutrality with minimal offsetting.

Read more about this low-carbon workspace project here: One Great Cumberland Place.

This month we launched the Tomorrow’s Market Good Practice Guide, a resource designed to help market managers, regeneration teams, and consultants develop effective market strategies.

Working with the Greater London Authority (GLA), this Good Practice Guide is an outcome from our pioneering research and advisory programme – Tomorrow’s Market 2.0 – setting out how Local Authorities can deliver resilient street markets that maximise their social and environmental impact. 

The launch was part of the Mayor of London’s ‘High Street Classroom’ series of events organised by JA Projects and Architecture00. The launch began with a tour of Walthamstow Market with Market Manager Adbul Komor explaining lessons-learnt from market improvement works. Megan Dean (GLA) launched the guide by speaking about the importance of markets in London’s economic framework with Susie Hyden (Gort Scott) and Abdullah Elias explaining the guide and the key ways that it is useful to Market Managers and Regeneration Teams. There followed a Marketplace Workshop where participants from Local Authority teams contributed to thematic roundtable discussions with facilitators. These covered ‘Enhancing the Market’ (with Susie Hyden), ‘Developing an Identity and Offer’ (with Abdullah Elias), ‘Business Support’ (with Sally Williams from Retail Revival) and ‘Environment and Sustainability’ (with Kate Howell, GLA) and fostered lively and useful discussions on the ways to safeguard the future of some of London’s key markets.

Thank you to all who joined us on the day, and to all who gave their time and contributions to the project.

Read/Download Tomorrow’s Market Good Practice Guide 2025 here.

Congratulations to Joe Crawford, who recently became a Certified Passivhaus Designer. Joe will build on our knowledge and expertise in designing energy-efficient buildings. He joins Jonathan Mann and Paul Wild in Gort Scott’s Passivhaus team, spreading best practice on all projects through our in-house training and reviews. This ever-growing expertise demonstrates our commitment to low carbon design.

Designing buildings to Passivhaus standards involves creating spaces that achieve exceptional energy efficiency, comfort, health and wellbeing by minimising energy use for heating and cooling and creating a stable, high quality internal environment. This is achieved through meticulous yet creative design, high-performance but practical construction, and enthusiastic collaboration with our clients, specialists and contractors.

Gort Scott is currently working on a £60m Passivhaus scheme for Girton College, Cambridge.

Enduring projects for a changing world

In changing social, environmental and economic contexts, we make projects with an enduring presence, influence or legacy whether they are buildings, temporary projects or long term strategies. Primarily, places endure when they are loved; so common to all our projects is care for people’s experience of the place, permeating all scales from the city to the detail.

This month we had the pleasure of hosting architecture students from the University of Westminster for a tour of our affordable housing project 458 Forest Road in Walthamstow.

The tour - led by Architect Benjamin Carter - forms part of the RIBA Future Architects programme, where we pair Gort Scott mentors with Year 3 BA Architecture students at universities across the UK, supporting future and emerging architects.

The initiative is part of our broader outreach programme, which includes workshops, work experience, internships and mentoring, and covers all ages from primary education through to adults in work.

Thanks to Pocket Living and the Forest Road residents.

Directors Jay Gort and Fiona Scott were invited by the Architecture Foundation to deliver the latest talk in the Architecture on Stage series.

The lecture, titled What Matters, reflected on how they practice architecture in a changing world. They structured the presentation around four key questions that drive the work that comes out of the practice:

1. What role does design play in the urban block?
2. Should we be building at all?
3. Can we be both bold and contextual?
4. Is it possible to create - in reality - the settings we imagine?

Thank you to everyone who joined us at the Barbican last week. It was a privilege to share the questions and ideas that have shaped our work over the years. A recording will be available soon via the Architecture Foundation.

Thank you to the Barbican, Ellis Woodman and the Architecture Foundation for the invitation.
 

Director Fiona Scott was invited by the Fritz Schumacher Gesellschaft to speak in Hamburg for the final event in a series of lectures at the Architektur Salon Hamburg titled MAGISTRALEN, which coincide with the launch of the city’s Magistralen Masterplan. 

Hamburg’s Magistralen are a series of important arterial roads, and the masterplan aims to turn them into more vibrant urban spaces. Main roads are the spatial backbone in Hamburg and a key focus of the urban development in the coming decades.

Fiona presented thoughts from Gort Scott’s analysis of urban blocks and streets, ideas on what makes a good high street building based on our public, workspace and community building projects, our Old Oak masterplan, civic buildings and housing.

The New Court: Girton College Cambridge was awarded Education Category Winner + Overall Winner of the 2025 AR Future Projects Award. Project Architect, Sela-Jaymes Taylor was invited by the Architectural Review to present the award-winning project at a special event last week (Wednesday 9th April), during Milan’s Salone del Mobile at Dropcity. Alongside The New Court, two highly commended projects were also presented. You can view all the category winners here.

Girton College set out their principles, values and ambitions in our earliest meetings with them, for a healthy, inclusive, place that supports student life and work, with respect for the immediate landscape context, and for the planet. We are really happy that the robustness of our design response to the challenging brief, has been endorsed by this award and look forward to seeing it come to life over the coming years.

Won through an extended design competition in 2024, this major planned addition to Girton College, University of Cambridge will be the most significant single building project on the College’s main site since its foundation in 1869, and to Passivhaus standards. Read about the project here.
 

We first achieved B Corp Certification 1 year ago. Our B Corp Certification demonstrates that we meet rigorous standards for environmental and social impact. As part of this certification, B Corps are required to publish an annual report. The primary purpose of a B Corp Impact Report is to transparently communicate our performance over the past year.

We are pleased to share our first B Corp Impact Report, published this week and available to download here.

We structured the report according to the five B Corp impact areas: Governance, Workers, Community, Environment, and Customers. Our report highlights not only our achievements but also our goals for the future. A large part of the B Corp ethos - and our own - is setting ambitious targets and striving for continuous improvement. Therefore, at the end of each
section we outline our aims and actions for the coming year. We look forward to sharing our progress with you in a year’s time.

The shortlist has been announced for the RIBA London (East) Awards and we’re pleased that our workspace project, 3 Mills Studios, has been selected.

The £6 million renovation project at 3 Mills Studios has successfully upgraded a series of historic buildings, creating 10,000 square feet of new workspaces while enhancing public access to and enjoyment of the site. Gort Scott, in collaboration with Freehaus, worked alongside the 3 Mills team and the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) to deliver a project that balances the adaptation of historic buildings with the needs of creative businesses. The works were made possible by funding from the Getting Building Fund via a £3m grant allocated by the Mayor of London.

Located on the banks of the River Lea in Bromley-by-Bow, 3 Mills is a unique remnant of historic London and is the city’s oldest surviving industrial centre. The project involves the adaptive reuse of three key buildings: the locally listed Gin Still, the Grade II listed Custom House, and Rush House. 

The project revitalised disused or under-used, at-risk heritage buildings, transforming them into lettable spaces for creative enterprises, significantly improving their environmental sustainability, climate resilience, and economic viability.

The New Court, Girton College is the overall winner in this year’s AR Future Projects awards!

The New Court is the most significant addition to Girton, the UK’s first full-time institution for the higher education of women, since its foundation in 1869. The project will allow Girton to accommodate a larger number of undergraduate and postgraduate students in the heart of the College, while improving conference and performance facilities, including an iconic auditorium. 

With an emphasis on sustainability, the new buildings will utilise innovative structural solutions to reduce carbon and meet Passivhaus Plus targets, all set within a bio-diverse landscape that extends an existing Orchard and includes waterways and wetlands.

Launched in 2002, The Architectural Review’s Future Projects awards are a window into tomorrow’s cities. Celebrating excellence in projects still on the drawing board or currently under construction, and the potential for positive contribution to communities, neighbourhoods and urban landscapes around the world. View the highly commended and shortlisted projects here.