London housing project wins UK's top architecture award for sensitive design

A suburban housing development in south London has claimed the UK's most prestigious architecture award, recognition that comes at a moment when the country's housing crisis often reduces buildings to their cost-per-unit and delivery speed. Lion Green Road in Coulsdon, a scheme of 157 homes arranged across five distinctive 13-sided blocks, won the 2026 Stirling Prize from the Royal Institute of British Architects. The judges' decision to honor this project signals something worth examining: that a building can be ambitious in its design, generous in its social purpose, and still fit gracefully into the landscape around it.

The site itself presented a puzzle. A former car park in Coulsdon, it slopes steeply—eight metres of elevation change across its footprint—and sits at the boundary between two different urban conditions: the busy Lion Green Road to the north, with its traditional suburban streets, and green-belt parkland to the south. Mary Duggan Architects, working with RUFF Architects, designed a scheme that treats this awkward geography not as a constraint to overcome but as the starting point for the entire project. The five blocks, clad in soft purple and pink brick, nestle into the hillside in a way that makes the development read as smaller than it is. Winding paths and planted areas weave between the buildings, creating shared outdoor spaces that feel public and permeable rather than gated and defensive. The scheme mixes affordable and private housing for Croydon Council, a deliberate choice to avoid the institutional feel that often marks social housing.

Mary Duggan, who grew up in south-west London, described the project as a challenge to conventional suburban logic—the assumption that housing must be organized around roads, private gardens, and clearly separated front and back spaces. Instead, Lion Green Road offers residents access to green space and allotments, with the paths and planting creating a sense of belonging rather than mere occupation. When Riba president Chris Williamson visited the site, he saw something that moved him personally. He grew up on a council estate in the East Midlands, and he has watched those homes disappear over decades, sold off into private ownership and never replaced. "Every time I go back," he told the BBC, "I think 'where would we have lived?'" For him, this project mattered because it represents a different choice—a commitment to building housing that is both architecturally serious and socially necessary.

The design itself works through specificity. The 13-sided blocks are not identical; small variations in brick pattern give each building its own identity while maintaining visual coherence. The way the development sits on the hillside means it does not read as a large housing scheme at all. The soft colors, the integration with existing trees, the community gardens—these details accumulate into something that feels less like development and more like careful inhabitation. Williamson noted that the blocks blend into the parkland beyond, creating what he described as "the sort of place I would have liked to have grown up in."

The project faced obstacles beyond the usual challenges of building in London. A change in building regulations meant the scheme had to navigate five or six additional constraints, all of which the architects addressed through inventive, site-specific responses. The jury recognized this: they praised the design for its ability to respond to a highly constrained plot without compromise. At a time when housing developments are routinely judged by their delivery metrics and cost efficiency, Lion Green Road was recognized instead for the way it responds to its surroundings, for the texture it adds to the landscape, and for the quality of life it offers the people who will live there. Duggan called the win "extraordinary, unexpected and humbling," and spoke of the project's ambition to prove that architectural ambition, social value, and social reality can coexist. The other finalists—a house in Epping Forest, a project in Hertfordshire, Paddington Square by Renzo Piano, and others—were all strong contenders, but the judges chose a suburban housing scheme, a project that most of the architecture world might have overlooked, because it asked a harder question: not how many homes can we build, but how should we live together.