Gort Scott and Pocket Living are hosting a guided tour of Forest Road for Open House Festival 2024.

Located in Walthamstow and completed in 2024, Forest Road provides 90 affordable one-bedroom homes for local first-time buyers. The tour will be led by project architect Andrew Tam.

Saturday 14 September 2024
Free Guided Tour, 14:00–15:00

458 Forest Road, Walthamstow E17 4PZ
Tube: Walthamstow Central

Book your tickets via Open House Festival

Access: The tour will last 1 hour. There are step-free routes, seating available, and accessible toilets.

Following on from our recent ‘town hall’ meeting at Gort Scott, which allowed the whole practice to workshop key sustainability objectives, the Environmental Action Group have finalised their Sustainable Design Roadmap in line with guidance from Architects Declare UK. The roadmap is designed to track a realistic course to meet our targets in 2030 and give guidance on the steps we need to take to get there.

The practice roadmap is intended to be used by staff of all levels and has allowed us to articulate the following objectives.

• To review our current progress as a practice against best practice standards across the built environment.
• To provide guidance for all staff when helping to develop / advocate for a strong sustainability brief.
• To provide an indication of what best practice looks like during project design development.
• To establish key knowledge and learning objectives we need to put in place as a practice to reach these goals.

Following the roadmap’s successful launch, we hope to re-invigorate our conversations around sustainability and consider how our working groups and collaborators can help us meet these challenging longer-term targets.

3 Mills Studios is shortlisted in the AJ Retrofit & Reuse Awards 2024, in the Adaptive Reuse into Office category.

3 Mills is a unique remnant of historic London and one of the UK’s foremost film and TV production studios. The locally listed Gin Still, Grade II listed Custom House and the Rush House were brought back into use, creating over 10,000 sq.ft of new workspace. Gort Scott – alongside Freehaus – worked alongside the 3 Mills team and LLDC to deliver a project that balances the adaptation of historic buildings with the needs of creative businesses using the site. A long-life loose fit approach provides flexible spaces that can support different configurations and uses.

To preserve the industrial character of the Gin Still, a new structure was inserted into the building, decorated in bold colour and establishing a clear dialogue between new and historic fabric. A passive first approach upgraded the envelope, and utilises its volume and thermal mass to provide natural ventilation.

The 2024 Brick Awards Shortlist is now live, and we’re pleased to see Forest Road is shortlisted in the Medium Housing Development category.

Designed for Pocket Living, Forest Road provides 90 affordable one-bedroom homes for local first-time buyers and makes excellent use of an under-utilised site, to provide 100% affordable homes. Forest Road is situated opposite the William Morris Gallery — the Grade II* listed former home of the Arts & Crafts activist in the London Borough of Waltham Forest.

For Forest Road, Gort Scott has evolved the language of brick and precast concrete decorative details first developed at nearby Gainsford Road (Gort Scott for Pocket Living, completed 2018), maintaining visual continuity across the two schemes to create a relatable identity whilst giving Forest Road its own distinct character.

Inspired by the curved bay windows of the William Morris Gallery, lintels are gently concave to catch soft shadows that animate with changing light. All precast elements are coloured to match the pink/red tones of Floren Vecchio brick. The material palette contains a mix of warm white, grey, plum, pink and red tones acknowledging the diverse colours of surrounding buildings, with a storey-height band of darker bricks forming a base to the building.

For London Festival of Architecture 2024 we hosted a ‘Studio Late’ event at our Bermondsey office. Nine of our retrofit projects were on display in the form of table-top project displays, produced especially for LFA visitors and situated over three floors of the building.

In addition to this, Gort Scott’s Retrofit and Heritage Knowledge Group created a set of 10 guiding principles for our work in retrofit: titled ‘Our Retrofit Manifesto’. Click here to read the Manifesto and download a PDF copy. There is also a large-scale version displayed on our office wall.

In our work, we prioritise the retrofit of existing buildings and have a deep care for historic fabric, learning from its layout and construction. Retrofit appeals to us on many levels: It answers our sense of civic and sustainable responsibility and our appetite for problem solving. Fundamentally, we enjoy it: The constraints of retrofit are a spring­board for good design, demanding the imagination to pursue unexpected directions, questioning, and collaborating until everything fits into place.

Gort Scott is taking part of London Festival of Architecture 2024 on Thursday 20th June by welcoming curious LFA guests through the doors of our self-built, retrofitted Bermondsey studio. Guests can browse drawings, samples, have a drink and engage with members of the studio.

Projects on show will focus on how buildings and spaces in cities evolve over time, and are creatively re-purposed and retrofitted. Projects include creative studios, life sciences, educational spaces, public realm and masterplans. Gort Scott has a natural affinity with retrofit: It sits well with our environmental concerns and love for thoughtful, contextual design. Guests can chat with our architects and urban designers - advocates for repurposing and reimagining existing buildings - to spark conversations around the environmental, commercial and social benefits of the retrofit approach within our city.

The evening will be led by members of Gort Scott’s Retrofit Heritage Knowledge Group & Environmental Action Group. Live and built projects will be on display including sketches and a material showcase.

Studio Late with Gort Scott
Thursday 20 June 2024
Drop-in between 18:00-20:00
Free event (no booking required)
Address: 55 Leroy Street, Bermondsey SE1 4SN

We are pleased to announce that our project 3 Mills Studios has won Creative Retrofit 2024 in The Pineapples Awards 2024.

The project involved the transformation of a series of buildings at 3 Mills Studios – For London Legacy Development Corporation.

Three Mills island is a unique remnant of historic London and is the city’s oldest still-surviving industrial centre. The new creative spaces will encourage the establishment of new businesses and employment opportunities by contributing to the economy of the Bromley-by-Bow area and providing a significant investment into the cultural sector, whilst supporting the growing TV and film industry in East London.

The project brings under-used heritage buildings back into life as new spaces, and greatly improves their environmental sustainability, climate resilience and economic viability. The judges commented on the real impact achieved for such a tight budget in this heritage setting and the ambition to consider the open space between the collection of buildings as a future public yard.

Read the full list of winners on The Developer website.

We are delighted that Unity Place has picked up a RIBA London Award 2024. On Friday we attended the awards ceremony alongside Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios and Alison Brooks Architects, our collaborators on the 100% affordable housing scheme in Brent.

“This project shows how it is possible to provide high-quality, sustainable and affordable housing, embodying the local council’s commitment to elevating the standard of living for its social residents. Through community engagement, careful planning, selection of materials and, importantly, a willingness of the three architectural practices to share a common ambition, language, and goals, Unity Place has set a benchmark for future residential developments.” RIBA Regional Jury

Read the award announcement at RIBAJ.com.

Director Fiona Scott has been invited to join the judging panel for AJ Small Projects 2024. Now in its 29^th year, the awards aim to give much-deserved recognition to schemes realised at a more modest cost (contract value of £350,000 and under).

Architects all over the country are working on projects that may not make headlines but nevertheless provide a real indication of the depth of design talent across the UK today. All the projects entered for the award will be featured in the AJ Buildings Library with the 20 shortlisted projects published in the AJ in April 2024.

The panel of judges will select a winner after reviewing the shortlisted entries, due to be presented on Wednesday 1st May at Hawkins\Browns’s Clerkenwell office.

Gort Scott’s founding directors Fiona Scott and Jay Gort will be in Leeds next month for UKREiiF. If you would like to get in touch and meet while you’re there, please contact them directly.

UK’s Real Estate Investment and Infrastructure Forum (UKREiiF) is held May 21st – 23rd 2024.

Gort Scott is now a Certified B Corporation. This is a major milestone for the practice and we are very proud of the whole team and what this signifies. It marks a significant point in our trajectory, with a focus on impact and accountability.

As a B Corp architecture practice, we’re part of a global community of businesses that meet high standards of social and environmental impact.

The journey to accreditation has involved a great deal of work, and has given us the opportunity to examine all our processes, inputs and outputs - but most of all how our values translate into actions.

We are particularly proud to have scored well in the B Corp impact areas of ‘Environment’ and ‘Community’. Despite this, being a B Corp isn’t about scoring highest, it’s about continuous improvement and this is just the beginning of our B Corp journey. We are looking forward to sharing what we’ve learnt through the process of auditing and self-reflection, along with our aspirations and goals for the future.

This achievement wouldn’t be possible without the dedication of our team, as well as the support of our clients, collaborators, and friends. Thank you for being part of this journey with us.

View our company profile and assessment on the B Corp website.

More soon!

We are very pleased to be shortlisted for The Pineapples Awards 2024 for a total of three projects. Our work has been recognised in several categories, for a range of projects spanning retrofit, culture, heritage and workplace.

In the running for a ‘golden pineapple’ are:

• 3 Mills Studios, a retrofit project creating workspace for film and TV production - Shortlisted for Creative Retrofit.
• Oxford North, Oxford, a new science and technology district - Shortlisted for Future Place.
• Unity Place, an affordable housing scheme for the London Borough of Brent - Shortlisted for Place of the Year.

The Pineapples Awards are unique in seeking to celebrate great places where people want to live, work, play, shop or learn. Live judging will take place as part of the Festival of Pineapples, 16-18 April.

The recognition of women’s contributions to architecture as a craft, a profession, an industry has evolved fast in the last 50 years but there’s a long way to go.

For Women’s History Month the Gort Scott team have developed a mapping project, inspired by ‘Women’s Work: London’ the excellent feminist mapping initiative by Part W. The campaign - launched in 2022 - sought to address the huge gap in how projects by women are so often missed off digital and printed maps and in archives.

Part W’s beautifully drawn and annotated map is displayed in our Bermondsey office this month, and each member of the Gort Scott team has nominated 1 female-centered project to build on the existing map. ‘Women’s Work: London’ highlights built projects in Greater London where a woman or women have played a pivotal role in its design development, conservation, commissioning or construction.

The map seeks to proactively celebrate the intersectional work of those who self-identify as women from all backgrounds. These women could be architects, engineers, place-makers, designers, commissioners, conservationists, landscape architects, activists, community groups, citizens, etc.

The Gort Scott team presented their nominations during a PechaKucha-style event in the office.

Thank you to Part W – the map has served as a perfect catalyst for new research and conversations during Women’s History Month!

View Part W’s project ‘Women’s Work: London’ here.

Today we celebrated the completion of Forest Road, with an opening ceremony hosted by Pocket Living and Legendre UK. The Deputy Mayor for London Housing, Tom Copley and Leader of Waltham Forest, Cllr Grace Williams also joined the speeches, which took place with panoramic views of Walthamstow, from the Forest Road roof terrace.

Located in the heart of Walthamstow E17, Forest Road will deliver 90 one-bedroom discounted homes for local first time buyers. The new Pocket Living homes are on a prominent site opposite Lloyd Park and the William Morris Gallery — the Grade II* listed former home of the Arts and Crafts activist.

We’re looking forward to sharing professional photography of the project very soon.

Last week Gort Scott organised a walking tour of several projects for the RIBA Future Mentoring students in Waltham Forest, London. The tour covered the projects Central Parade (Phase 1 and Phase 2), Fellowship Square, Waltham Forest Town Hall and two Pocket Living projects: Forest Road and Gainsford Road.

Gort Scott has built up an intimate understanding of Waltham Forest, having been involved in many aspects of the Borough’s development since 2009, beginning with the Blackhorse Lane Area Action Plan and continuing with major regeneration of the Town Hall Campus. The Pocket Living scheme at Gainsford Road was shortlisted for an AJ Award (Housing) and Waltham Forest Design Award in 2021.