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

Gort Scott and 5th Studio’s contribution to the Olympic Park Legacy, Pudding Mill Lane, has been featured in the NLA Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park: Living, Learning, Legacy report.

This new report examines the vision, purpose and challenges behind Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and spotlights projects which are integral to the ongoing Olympic Legacy and regeneration of East London.

Pudding Mill Lane is a long-term development set for completion in 2031, proposing a thriving new town centred around an overground station and providing 900 new homes, 40% of which will be affordable housing, and 36,000 sqm of employment space.

Local contexts have been a priority in designing Pudding Mill Lane, with thorough consultations taking place with local people and businesses, and workshops being organised with Local Youth Voice.

Read more about Pudding Mill Lane and the Olympic Legacy here.

Fiona Scott will be a part of Brent Cross Town, a panel at this year’s London Real Estate Forum. She will be in conversation about Related Argent Related and Brent Council’s upcoming regeneration of Brent Cross through the lens of LREF 2022. The long-term functionality of cities and urban spaces and what infrastructure and governance systems will underpin and co-ordinate them is up for consideration.

As a Mayor’s Design Advocate Fiona is closely involved in pioneering high street research, masterplanning and strategy projects. She works with developers and public authorities to support the evolution of places through design and integration with social and economic contexts.

Related Argent and Brent Council are working together to bring 6,700 homes and 3 million sq ft of office space to the new Brent Cross Town which will be set around 50 acres of parks and playing fields. With local park amenities being highly desirable, and 11 million of the working population within a 90-minute commute, demand for space at Brent Cross Town is high but what are the essentials needed to build a new town?

With speakers:

Sadie Morgan, Co-Founding Director, dRMM

Tom Goodall, Partner and Head of Residential, Related Argent

Matt Flood, Office Lead, Related Argent

Fiona Scott, Director, Gort Scott

Cath Shaw, Deputy Chief Executive, Barnet Council

28th Sept, 12pm, Frobisher Auditorium 2, Barbican

Unity Place and Fellowship Square, Phase 2 have been shortlisted for the NLA Awards 2022 in the Housing and Mixed Use categories.

We are happy to have projects so rooted in community engagement, urban planning and retrofit recognised by the New London Architecture Awards.

Congratulations to all of our collaborators:

Unity Place: Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, Alison Brooks Architects, and Brent Council

Fellowship Square: Metropolitan Workshop, London Borough of Waltham Forest and Countryside

We have completed the first six apartments within an Edwardian Mansion in LB Fulham and Hammersmith.

Gort Scott have been appointed by Dorrington to retrofit Quenington Mansion and Bridge Avenue Mansion. The two blocks are sited within Central Fulham and Hammersmith Town Hall Conservation Areas, respectively.

The proposals seek to upgrade the thermal and acoustic performance of the buildings by sensitively insulating the exterior walls and roof while also upgrading the single glazed exterior windows and door. Internally strategic incisions and alterations have been made to open and improve the existing apartment layouts, in addition to improvements to the shared amenity spaces. We will be upgrading shared amenity spaces and making each apartment fully accessible, as well as improving the thermal, acoustic, and fire performances.

Working carefully with the existing structure, the vast majority of the interior building fabric has been retained whilst strategic incisions and alterations have been made to open and improve the existing apartment layouts in line with current standards.

The next phase of the project has commenced and includes the upgrading of exterior balconies, with the remaining work currently slated for 2023.

Gort Scott has been invited to host on the 15th of September Open House Festival’s walking tour of South Kilburn regeneration project Unity Place, alongside Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, Alison Brooks Architects, Grant Associates and Emma Sweeney, Brent Council.

The project is part of a 26 year scheme for South Kilburn and has recently been shortlisted for the Building Awards Housing Project of the Year, AJ Awards Housing Project, WAF Awards Best Housing of the Year, and British Home Awards Best Housing Partnership.

Find out more and book your space here.

The Building Awards has shortlisted St Hilda’s College for Project of the year, and Unity Place for Housing Project of the Year.

The Building Awards recognises the best in design, architecture and construction across the UK. This year’s judging panel including Philippa Simpson, Director of Design, Estate and Public Programme at V&A; Vanessa Murray, Asset Manager at Stanhope; and Lanre Gbolade, Co-Founder & Director at Gbolade Design Studio.

Congratulations to Beard for their work on St Hilda’s and to our collaborators at Feilden Clegg Bradley and Alison Brooks Architects for this celebration of our work on Unity Place.

Winners to be announced at an awards ceremony on 1st November.