Matt + Fiona

GOSH Arts have just turned ten and we are so proud to have been collaborators over the past few years. This last week we were humbled to be part of the GOSH Arts Festival where there were creative activities popping up all over the hospital.

We led a collaborative sculpture making session, using materials from the building that was demolished to make space for the new Children’s Cancer Centre. The drop in making session attracted patients and families who popped in for anything from 5 minutes to over an hour, bringing imaginative pieces made from timber and wire.

In the evening the young people’s installation was displayed at the Dig Deep event for GOSH Charity at the Artworkers Guild.

These co-design and making explorations are paving the way towards an installation in the new cancer centre, that will be co-designed and made with patients and their families.

Understanding where materials come from, their natural properties and how they respond to fabrication processes is a vital part of being a good designer. It was therefore a joy to visit Cannock Chase with the Design & Construction Club young designers. This ancient forestry is home to so many species of trees, plants and wildlife.

Following a tour from the forestry guides and Lucy the young designers created spaces and structures responding to specific parts of the forest. These included a swing, ladder and dens, all using found materials and timber in the forest, and colourful pre-made nodal joints

These are all exciting exploratory steps towards our summer build 🔨🪜🔩🪵🌱

Huge thanks to the team including James Sarah & Parm

Beautiful photos as always from .grabowska

The young designers from prototyping their designs for public realm seating and sculpture for the Regents Park Estate. They’ll be physically building their unique designs this summer, using reclaimed materials from the Reflect pavilion and meanwhile garden, formerly on Hampstead Road.

Brilliant project led by Jess Kendall on our team, in collaboration with Kirsty & Manfredi at for Camden Council

Plans for the weekend? If not why not head to Southbank to enjoy the Architecture Explorers Trail which has popped back up this May half term 🫧🪁🧩🏙️🚧🎢🎈

Thank you .grabowska for the beautiful photos

Welcoming the next chapter of Reflect Pavilion as its young designers reconfigure it into seating & sculpture for the Regent’s Park Estate.

As part of wider landscaping and traffic calming measures taking place in the estate, designed by the young designers from are creating bespoke designs from the reclaimed material that encourage engagement with nature & play.

The designs and now being worked through technical and maintenance requirements with LDA, and we and Fitzrovia Youth in Action will build them in August.

✨ The way light falls across the wall
🏞️ Where to stand at a window to catch the furthest view
🎞️ Peeling back memories in layers of wall paper
🧱 The texture of the walls beneath your finger tips
🌬️ The breezes coming down a chimney
🎼The hum of a home’s daily rhythms

It’s the little things that underpin our connection with our environments, shifting them from detached, abstract spaces to places with meaning & memory.

A series of beautiful, kinetic & poetic models made by the young designers of the Design & Construction Club at Link Road that demonstrate getting to know places in their minutiae through all their senses. And sharing that insider knowledge with others.

These will pave the way to a series of larger installations at the Neighbourhood Public Square this summer that encourage participants and those who experience the installations to get to know the site through all their senses. They will also continue to inform how the brilliant team and the design team continue to approach its design.

Beautiful workshop led by Matt, Daniel Sarah & Parm

We teach children about what they as individuals should be doing to look after the environment… recycling, switching lights off when they leave a room etc. But we rarely teach them about what they should expect from their built environment and the people creating it on their behalf. And yet this is where the greatest impact can be made ✨

So it was fantastic to collaborate with as part of their ongoing schools’ outreach to demonstrate the importance of retrofit and reuse in buildings with Year 8 students at the East Manchester Academy.

The students built 1:20 models, creating a new facade (including insulation!) for an existing building - mirroring the approach Bywater are taking at Fountain Street in Manchester.

CIVIC SQUARE’s Neighbourhood Public Square has gone in for planning so the Design & Construction Club have been creating posters and calls for action for everyone to get involved and have their say.

Head over the to find out more about their beautiful proposals - on every level - for the transformation of a former waste transfer station to a demonstration of regenerative, civic infrastructure at the heart of Ladywood, Birmingham.

Knowing how dense planning applications can be, CIVIC SQUARE have distilled everything as clearly as possible. The Design & Construction Club who collaborate alongside the design team (& over time will be becoming more & more involved) created these powerful posters as an alternative to the tiny A4 flyers usually put up. Maybe they could become a precedent for all planning notices seeing proposals through the eyes of the next generation? ✨

This week we were invited to the House of Lords to speak to their Built Environment Committee on the value of youth engagement in the built environment, and how to make it happen. We presented evidence from the 80 place making projects that have engaged almost 10,000 young people, with a host of incredible local authorities and developers, cultural organisations, schools and youth groups.

Alongside Nicola Rochfort, Head of Engagement & Insights at Grovesnor, and Teresa Strachan, Academic in planning, we presented:

✨ The value to placemakers - the future proofing, better research visioning, the trust building and ultimately often swifter planning timeframes that result

🌱 The value to young people - increased real world learning, problem solving, creativity & skills and the well being that comes from feeling listened to & like you belong

🌍 The value to society - resulting better spaces that are more locally informed, environmentally sensitive and socially just, with the input of people seeing spaces and places exactly as they are, and not through the economic lens of property.

The full session can be viewed at the Parliament TV link in our bio.

Thank you to the House of Lords Built Environment Committee for the invitation (as an aside, for us it demonstrated the value of submitting written evidence to an open call from government - you never know where it will lead.) If you’d told us ten years ago when we first started handing that we’d be speaking on the topic at the House of Lords, we’d have never believed you. We hope this is an indicator of hope across the board and that it heralds tangible policy change.

Looking for something fun to do in London this Easter? The Architecture Explorers Trail reopens today ready for the long weekend. Co-designed by children and families, it encourages you to look afresh at the views and stories of this part of the river Thames & London.

📸 by Pete Woodhead
Joyful project led by Matt and for