Construction has started on site for our second project for Pocket Living, Forest Road.

The development will provide 90 affordable homes, sitting on a prominent triangular site opposite Lloyd Park and the William Morris Gallery. As with our previous Pocket Living project, Gainsford Road, we were tasked with achieving high density within a low-rise context. We worked closely with the council and local community through consultation to achieve a design which addresses the heritage value and town centre setting of the site.

We are proud to work with Pocket Living who champion affordable housing for first time buyers in London. They work closely with local councils to produce high-quality dwellings which remain frozen at 20% below the market rate and are available exclusively for people who already live or work locally in relation to each project.

Architectural Assistant Kleovoulos Aristarchou features in the 2022 issue of Urbanogram with his essay Rathbone Market as Intangible Heritage which discusses how considering markets as ‘Intangible Heritage’ within Planning Applications can protect the vital role markets play in our city and community infrastructure.

Gort Scott have been working with the GLA and Market sector over the past year to deliver Tomorrow’s Market 2.0, a research and advisory programme that addresses the key challenges faced by markets in London. This is drawn together into a ‘How-to’ Market Strategy best practice guidance due to be launched this spring.

Find out about Gort Scott’s work with markets here: Brixton Market, Oxford Covered Market, Tomorrow’s Market 2.0

Image: Kleovoulos Aristarchou

Gort Scott are working for Stanhope and Thomas White Oxford and collaborating with Fletcher Priest Architects, Wilkinson Eyre and Gustafson Porter + Bowman to create an exciting new innovation district for Oxford.

The new mixed-use scheme will deliver 1 million sq ft of new carbon-efficient labs and workspaces for 4,500 people, 480 new homes, a hotel, shops, bars and cafés, and three public parks.

The in-person public consultation was well attended and an online survey helped collect feedback and comments from the community.

Gort Scott are pleased to have become a member of the UK Green Building Council (UKGBC), a membership organisation which aims ‘to radically improve the sustainability of the built environment’.

“Gort Scott joined UKGBC as part of our support for faster industry change. We are committed to training, research, collaboration and knowledge sharing to maximise our impact”.

Jonathan Mann, Associate — Environmental Action Group Lead.

St Hilda’s College, Oxford has been shortlisted as a regional finalist in the Civic Trust Awards 2023.

The Civic Trust Awards scheme has been recognising outstanding architecture, planning and design in the built environment since 1959.

The awards are particularly interested in projects that exhibit strong sustainability credentials, a high level of accessible and universal design, and also provide a positive civic contribution.

The transformative St Hilda’s development has given the Oxford college a dynamic and recognisable street presence and has bridged the north and south sides of the college for the first time.

We are honoured that St Hilda’s has been chosen as one of 127 regional finalists that will now be reviewed by the Civic Trust Awards and AABC National Judging Panels.

Winners to be announced on Monday 9th January.

Last week we were able to celebrate the completion of Gateway West which takes its place amongst the new White City Place business campus in West London.

Gort Scott director Jay Gort, project associate Jonathan Mann, and project architect Dominic Dudley attended Stanhope’s completion ceremony for Gateway West and Gateway Central which brought together collaborators to celebrate the opening of this important section of Allies and Morrison’s White City Place masterplan.

Working with Stanhope, Sweco, AKT II, Sir Robert McAlpine and Allies and Morrison, Gort Scott have completed a new purpose built office space in the growing business campus at White City which sits alongside Allies and Morrison’s Gateway Central building.

Collaborators: Allies and Morrison (masterplan architect), AKT II (structural engineer and facade), SWECO (services, sustainability and ecology, fire), HED (landscape), Sandy Brown (acoustics), IM2 (CDM), Socotec (approved inspector), Grain (model), Deloitte (quantity surveyor), AVR (visual impact), GIA (daylight/sunlight), Vectos (traffic), Gerald Eve (planning), LBHF (local planning authority)

As part of the Property X-Change programme of events, on Wed 7th Dec Gort Scott are hosting a breakfast forum at their self-built Bermondsey office exploring the question ‘Does housing benefit the high street ecosystem?’.

As many new developments in town centres become residentially led, we want to bring together a variety of experts to discuss the challenges and opportunities of delivering housing on the high street.

Led by Fiona Scott, co-founder of Gort Scott and Mayor’s Advisory Board member for High Streets, and joined by Neil Murphy from TOWN, Esther Everett from the LLDC and Julian Lewis from East, we will discuss:

• Does housing benefits the high street ecosystem?
• What does it mean to live ‘on the High Street’?
• How can we innovate to create fair and equitable places to live at density, and live comfortably alongside other uses?

Join the discussion! We welcome those interested in delivering high street and town centre housing to join in sharing knowledge and thoughts on what design and commercial innovations might be required to better knit housing into the wider town centre ecosystem, while safeguarding the quality of living for all old, new, and future high street residents.

Join via the Property X-change website https://propertyxchange.london/discover/housing-the-high-street/ or send an expression of interest to our team.

Gort Scott’s bespoke home project The Rock has been featured in art and design historian Agata Toromanoff’s Living on the Edge. In this book Toromanoff compiles cliff-edge buildings from around the world and takes a closer look at the architectural thought behind them.

The Rock is a family home perched upon a distinctive rocky outcrop in Whistler, Canada. Considering how to approach this challenging topography, we recalled a passage from the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1932 autobiography: ‘No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together, each the happier for the other.’ This would become the founding principle of the design.

Find Living on the Edge here.

Gort Scott’s St Hilda’s College has received a special commendation in the education category at Brick Awards.

St Hilda’s brick facade was thoughtfully designed to blend with the existing backdrop and landscape of the college whilst simultaneously establishing a new presence and identity from the street front.

We are pleased to have been included in the Brick Awards shortlist amongst so many other exciting and innovative educational spaces.

Director and co-founder Jay Gort has just returned from a site visit to our house project in Kerasia, Corfu. The project spans a collection of three buildings arranged across a sloping olive grove and is the lifelong aspiration of our client.

The construction is rooted in traditional practices and we are working with talented local tradespeople, Nico and his team at Gaia, to create a structure which will be true to the history of the landscape. The care and craft from this team is evident throughout the project, right down to each piece of local stone which has been precisely hand-chiselled on site by stone mason Yannis.

It’s been rewarding to work with the site’s topography and local contexts to create an emerging space which is embedded in its surrounding natural landscape and coexist with its historic surroundings.

Our friends at Morris+Company hosted a cross-practice get together on Friday at their new Mare Street studio.

Practices from across the Londonon framework joined together for an evening discussing recent collaborations in three open international architectural competitions, including AR Future Projects winner LAX Laksevåg, exploring ideas at the scale of city fragments; Bergen, Tallinn and Oslo.

Striving to work collaboratively with our peers is a core value for us at Gort Scott. Thank you to Morris+Company for curating the evening and giving us the opportunity to introduce some of our new Part 1s and Part 2s to Londonon.

Londonon is: Neighbourhood, Haptic Architects, Morris+Company, Mae, Elliott Wood, Skelly & Couch, Turner.Works, Coffey Architects and Gort Scott

The London Legacy Development Corporation’s (LLDC) Planning Decisions Committee has voted unanimously to give the green light to an outline planning application that will transform Pudding Mill Lane on Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park into a new residential and commercial neighbourhood.

Forming a new neighbourhood centre and supporting Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park’s growing innovation district, the Pudding Mill Lane masterplan – developed by a multidisciplinary team assembled and led by Gort Scott, with design collaborators 5th Studio, JCLA and ZCD – sets out LLDC’s commitment to delivering a rich mix of social infrastructure, complementary uses, and high-quality public amenities to create a vibrant place to live, work and visit. As well as providing new homes and workspaces, the masterplan provides publicly accessible open space, with two new riverside parks and a new urban square at Pudding Mill DLR station, seeking to unlock connectivity improvements and support a series of wider social and economic opportunities.

Around 948 homes will be delivered with a minimum of 45% affordable homes by habitable room, of which a minimum of 30% will be low-cost rent housing by dwelling. A diverse range of housing needs have been carefully considered, with at least 51% of homes family-sized with two or more bedrooms including apartments, townhouses and maisonettes, as well as provision for 40 dedicated later living homes. Families will be supported with a nursery, health centre, community pavilion, inclusive play areas and local courtyards with biodiverse planting, as well as the new neighbourhood centre with shops, cafes and restaurants around Pudding Mill DLR station.

In addition, the development will include up to 52,000sq.m of floor space which will accommodate a rich mix of workspace, retail, community and leisure uses. Delivering ‘good growth’ with employment and skills opportunities for young people, and space for businesses to seed, grown and scale up – complementing clusters of cutting-edge businesses at Here East, Hackney Wick and Fish Island Creative Enterprise Zone, East Bank and International Quarter London – Pudding Mill Lane will generate around 2,000 jobs.

Gort Scott is leading a team working with Oxford City Council to develop a masterplan to rejuvenate the city’s historic Covered Market. A public consultation on masterplan proposals is currently under way.

The Grade II listed Covered Market opened in 1774 and has evolved alongside Oxford, accommodating the competing requirements of individual traders as well as complex servicing and logistics requirements. Its avenues have accumulated disparate changes that obscure the historic fabric and make the market hard to find and navigate around.

Gort Scott hopes to fully realise Oxford Covered Market’s potential with an ambitious plan that will renew the building’s historic fabric and create new spaces for businesses. Proposals include changing Market Street into a pedestrian-priority street, works to improve entrances and strategic retrofitting to create a large new flexible communal area off Market Street. These new flexible spaces will add to what the Market provides and improve wayfinding from Cornmarket and Turl Streets, aiming to increase customer access and draw. Oxford Covered Market will become the community’s everyday hub, and a natural space for evening dining and events.

“We passionately believe in markets as places of innovation and the original business incubator. We have worked closely with the Oxford City Council team, traders and neighbouring stakeholders to shape a masterplan to secure the Covered Market’s long-term future.” Susie Hyden, Associate Director at Gort Scott.

Oxford Covered Market presents an exciting opportunity for the community to guide the development of a new kind of truly open and friendly amenity for Oxford, accessible to everyone and open for all.

This year the Gort Scott Communications team has been hard at work developing a new look for our Instagram that reflects our core business principles. With this new iteration of our social media we aimed to bring joy and cultivate curiosity; sharing projects, perspectives and insights which give an intimate view into how we operate as a practice.

We’re so pleased to have this work acknowledged by Archiboo in their Best Use of Social Media Award for 2022. Archiboo was established in 2016 as platform for recognising creative storytelling and new ideas within architecture.

Winners to be announced in November.

We are delighted that members of LondonOn have been awarded a commendation for international competition ‘Circular Block - Reinventing the Mikrorayan’ which will be featured as part of the Tallinn Architecture Biennale.

The Circular Block competition explores architecture’s capacity to creatively convert waste to energy and materials through a circular economy. Through the design of an urban unit that operates as a circular system in its resources and economy protocols, the aim of Circular Block is to define new productive and socially cohesive urban models that question the traditional consumption and production systems in cities.

This follows our group being named as Winners in the LAX Laksevåg Masterplan urban design competition in Bergen, and they are currently shortlisted for the Grønlikaia Waterfront competition in Oslo. We have found these collaborations to be enriching and offer new perspectives on what it is to be involved in a large project.

Our proposal for Circular Block was designed in collaboration with:

Neighbourhood, Morris + Company, Haptic Architects, Mae, Elliott Wood, Skelly & Couch, Gort Scott