Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
New dawn … Nightingale, a forthcoming housing scheme overseen by Hackney council’s Ken Rorrison, who recently left the firm he founded 20 years ago.
New dawn … Nightingale, a forthcoming housing scheme overseen by Hackney council’s Ken Rorrison, who recently left the firm he founded 20 years ago. Photograph: Karakusevic Carson/Henley Halebrown/Stephen Taylor Architects
New dawn … Nightingale, a forthcoming housing scheme overseen by Hackney council’s Ken Rorrison, who recently left the firm he founded 20 years ago. Photograph: Karakusevic Carson/Henley Halebrown/Stephen Taylor Architects

Spectacular buildings for everyone: how to stop ugly housing and fix urban planning for good

This article is more than 6 years old

What does success mean in architecture? Gleaming towers? Mega profits? Setting up your own practice? There could be a more fulfilling way. Meet the duo determined to lure architects back into working for the greater good

In 1979, 49% of all qualified architects in the UK worked in the public sector, designing housing, schools, hospitals and parks, in the rosy days when local authorities still had budgets for such luxuries. Now that figure is just 0.7%.

The dramatic decline has been due to both the removal of councils’ powers to build their own housing, which ended under Margaret Thatcher, and the atomising of the planning process into specialist areas of expertise. Planning applications are now examined by officers responsible for heritage and highways, trees and bat welfare, but rarely is there someone with an overarching design vision for the place in question.

Councils have had their budgets slashed, but even those with resources are desperately struggling to recruit the right people: last year, in the east of England alone, local authorities spent £700,000 advertising 115 vacancies. Most are being forced to use external consultants and private agencies to fill the gap, which can cost twice as much as traditional recruitment, while eroding local knowledge. Often, these short-term staffers haven’t even visited the places they’re adjudicating over.

Blue sky thinking … Worland Gardens in London, the work of Peter Barber, one of the most imaginative and playful architects working on local authority housing. Photograph: Morley von Sternberg

These are just some of the reasons why architects-turned-planners Finn Williams and Pooja Agrawal have set up Public Practice, a social enterprise backed by the Mayor of London, aimed at encouraging the best young designers to go into the public sector – and forge a bold new generation of proactive planners embedded in local government.

“As an architect in practice, you often find yourself designing the right answer to the wrong brief,” says Williams, who trained as an architect and worked at a number of offices, including OMA in Rotterdam, before joining Croydon council’s placemaking team in 2008. “I realised important decisions were happening much further upstream, in the realms of policy, way before an architect would even get involved.”

At Croydon, and later at the Greater London Authority, he says it was “an incredible luxury” to be able to work in a single place over a long period of time, getting to know the people, pavements and policies of the place, and work with multiple departments. “It was amazing to be able to make decisions genuinely for the public good,” he says, “rather than on the basis of profit.”

Inspired by such graduate trainee models as Teach First and Year Here, Public Practice will connect architects, planners and engineers with local government departments in need of design talent. And the need is certainly there: a recent report by Place Alliance found that half of all local authorities have no in-house design capacity at all.

‘In practice, you often find yourself designing the right answer to the wrong brief’ … Finn Williams and Pooja Agrawal. Photograph: Eleanor Bentall/Greater London Authority

A big obstacle to attracting new recruits is the stigma around working in the public sector. There remains a widely-held stereotype that planning departments are the realm of dusty, tweed-jacketed types, nested in their booths for the last half century. Williams says that when he started at Croydon, a colleague pitied him, assuming he had ended up there because he couldn’t get a job in an architecture practice.

“We need to challenge the idea of what ‘success’ looks like,” says Agrawal, a Cambridge and UCL architecture graduate who now works in the GLA regeneration team. “When you’re studying, the expectation is that you’ve succeeded when you set up your own practice. It would be great if it could be communicated that there are other, potentially much more fulfilling opportunities out there.”

One architect who has found such fulfilment later in life is Ken Rorrison, who recently left the architecture firm he founded over 20 years ago, Henley Halebrown Rorrison, to become design manager of the 95-person strong regeneration team at Hackney council, helping to deliver 4,000 homes across the borough.

“It sounds trite, but I felt there was another way of making a difference and getting more involved in the bigger picture,” he says. “As an architect, you’re driving up the quality of individual buildings, but what excited me was connecting these things together with an overarching view. I feel really useful. And there’s far more autonomy than you might imagine.”

Shape of things to come … hexagonal towers in Hackney, London, by Karakusevic Carson and David Chipperfield, under the local authority’s housing initiative. Photograph: Emanuelis Stasaitis

Beginning with a cohort of 16 people, the Public Practice placements will run for a year, initially in London and the south-east, but with the ambition to grow into a national network. Potential applicants might be put off by perceptions of public sector pay, but the positions will have a salary of £30-50,000, a good deal more than many practices offer. “And you get to have a life,” says Rorrison.

The pressure for change is coming from the development industry too. Housebuilders have identified providing additional resources to local council planning departments as the single most important policy measure to boost housing supply – part of why Berkeley Group and British Land, along with the GLA, Peabody and others, are supporting Public Practice. Williams hopes the forthcoming 20% increase in planning fees will go towards funding more proactive planning too.

With many councils finally setting up their own house-building departments, and several thousand local authority-led homes already in the pipeline across the country, the initiative couldn’t come at a better time. Now is the time to attract the best minds to the public sector.

More on this story

More on this story

  • V&A acquires segment of Robin Hood Gardens council estate

  • The architect who reminds us council housing can be beautiful

  • Rochdale charity’s demolition plans spark ‘social cleansing’ claims

  • Lived Brutalism: portraits from Robin Hood Gardens housing estate – in pictures

  • A tale of two brutalist housing estates: one thriving, one facing demolition

  • Decisions on which buildings to preserve have never been so erratic

  • Five architectural treasures we must save from the UK’s heritage war

  • Utopia now: the heritage of London's brutalist architecture – in pictures

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed