This year, I joined the panel for the Davidson Prize – a brilliant platform that celebrates bold, imaginative concepts in residential architecture. The prize champions collaboration across disciplines and encourages designers to communicate their ideas visually, effectively, and powerfully.

This year’s theme was Streets Ahead: The race to build 1.5 million homes, and the winning concept– 300 Homes within a Union Street Mile – came from Clifton Emery Design, working with Nudge Community Builders, Millfields Trust, Plymouth Energy Community, and Devon and Cornwall Planning Consultants.

It’s a smart, scalable idea; 300 affordable homes and co-living spaces integrated sensitively into an existing high street.

Housing delivery in the UK is top down, being dominated largely by House Builders, Registered Providers and to a lesser extent BTR investors – all of whom provide a relatively standardised housing format. We were impressed by the idea of an alternate, bottom-up delivery mechanism, driven by local people, invested in their immediate neighbourhood, working to solve not just a local housing issue but also what to do with their failing high street. It offers a realistic, replicable model that with strong local leadership and support from Local Authority partners could be rolled out all over the UK - not only adding much needed housing numbers but also starting the process of reinvigorating the high street.

Judging the submissions – and seeing such innovation and imagination at play was impressive. The Davidson Prize remains a powerful reminder of what’s possible when good design is used to solve real-world problems.

This isn’t the only initiative I’ve been involved in recently. Earlier this year, my colleague Mark Latham and I contributed to the Design Council’s Homes Taskforce – a government-backed project aiming to deliver 1.5 million homes while keeping within the 1.5-degree climate target.

Alongside design leaders like George Clarke, Annalie Riches, and Sunand Prasad PPRIBA, we called for a ‘whole stock’ housing strategy, prioritising retrofit and reuse over new-build sprawl. It’s a strategy we’ve long championed at Urban Splash, from our work at Park Hill in Sheffield to wider regeneration schemes across the UK.

Park Hill itself featured prominently in the Taskforce’s paper – not only in the imagery, but also as the host of one of the council’s recent roundtables. It’s great to see such iconic buildings used as a blueprint for the future.

Whether it’s advising on national housing policy or celebrating grassroots innovation, I’m proud that my colleagues and I can play a part in shaping the next generation of homes. We need places that are beautiful, practical, and resilient – places that meet the needs of future generations, not just today’s.

Good design has the power to do all of that. And at Urban Splash, we’ll keep pushing boundaries to make sure it does.