Croydon's Lion Green Road, briefed at 80 homes and built at 157, wins the Stirling prize

The step from 80 homes to 157 came from the form of the buildings, designed by Mary Duggan Architects with Ruff Architects ^[1]. Duggan said: "We really pushed against the suburban model of terraces dominated by cars, with little front and back gardens." ^[4] The original brief asked for 80 homes, arranged as she describes, and she answered with five pavilion-like towers that kept the mature trees and bluebell woodland ^[2][3]. All five share a star-shaped plan, and each is rotated slightly to reduce direct overlooking, so the buildings can stand close together ^[5]. The result is 77 more homes than the brief asked for ^[19], just under double ^[20].

The tenure split matters to anyone reading the scheme as a model for affordable housing. Half the flats are private rentals in two towers. The other half are affordable, in three blocks the council keeps, let at local housing allowance rates ^[6]. The Guardian notes that, unlike Goldsmith Street in Norwich, this is not true social housing ^[7]. Half of 157 is 78.5, so the affordable share is about 78 or 79 flats ^[21], close to the 80 homes the brief asked for in total ^[2]. The Guardian does not report the brief's tenure mix, the build cost, any grant or the rents, so its account cannot show how many affordable homes the extra density added or whether the private half supported the affordable one.

The planning file is the sharpest test of the model. The application, submitted in 2017, drew 18 letters of support and 257 objections, mostly about the loss of parking ^[9]. That makes roughly 93% of the letters objections ^[22]. The Guardian says the finished scheme keeps plenty of parking ^[11].

The template language comes from a critic and an architecture body. The Guardian's review says Andy Burnham "would do well to visit Croydon" ^[17], and RIBA president Chris Williamson said: "Lion Green Road shows that density can be achieved without compromising the quality of the places we create." ^[16] Both endorse the design. The review sets them beside a government plan to put £39bn into housing ^[14].

Duggan described the council's housebuilder, Brick by Brick, as an amazing client. She said it was a refreshing change from how private developers think about affordable housing, because it treated the land as a genuinely public asset and not as a commodity ^[13].

The one completed timeline the Guardian gives is slow. The application went in during 2017 ^[9] and the scheme was built almost a decade later ^[10]. In our view, a funder allocating money now should plan around that figure until another scheme shows a faster one.