Hi, Heather, how are you? 

Good, thank you! 

Good. I wanted to talk to you to commemorate, really, your promotion within the business, but also to talk about Makower more generally. Firstly, then, can you tell me about your move to become principal? Because you've only been there, what, three years from McAslan's. Is that right? 

Yes. I was hired for this role. I actually met Tim [Makower] on a trip overseas many years before, and so it's been actually quite a slow conversation, but I came into the company, basically took the strategy to sit back and learn before jumping straight to that title, and really understand the business - moving the culture in a new direction and trying to understand how to do that in the most meaningful way for everybody. 

Your role is to push the business into certain sectors or areas? Have you got a particular focus that you want to develop? 

I guess succession planning underpins everything, and Tim, by no means is stepping back fully, but it is preparing for the next 10, 20, years. At McAslan, I was responsible for leading on a lot of the new business work and internationally, but across lots of sectors. Makower's has a fantastic grounding across multiple things, because of the master planning background and Tim's journey from Allies and Morrison, with things like King's Cross but yes, my role is to expand that wider client base, get a wider client base and a greater diversity of projects - but still very much building on the ethos and brilliant grounding in the practice today. 

And in terms of some of those project projects three projects particularly jumped out at me, Homestead being the first one, which looks like a kind of Maggie's idea for mental health. Have I summarised it correctly there? 

Yes. Homestead actually purposely sits separately from Makower. It's a CRT and it's built from lived experience of both Tim and myself, but we have a wider partnership with Dr Andrew Howe and The Maudsley, and it really looks at that intersection between psychology and architecture. It’s supported housing, but it's specifically looking at psychosis. There's lots of work around mental health, but Schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorders are not looked at, and there is not really - or at all - a space for it within the planning system. This project is building that from the ground up and obviously looking at it from a policy level to say there is a gap and a need here, and there are vulnerable people that have no place in our policy. But also, as architects we are sort of stepping out of our comfort zone a little bit; we have a farm in Wales and are looking to actually build specialist supported accommodation for severe mental health challenges, and working collaboratively with the NHS in Wales, who have a really interesting system. 

 

So that's the first site; have you got any others? Or are you just concentrating on getting that one done first? 

There are many facets. That is our first site. But we're in discussion with other developers in London, and with The Maudsley as well, looking at some of some of their land. We're also developing a pop-up; we're just putting our first funding application in, and we're doing it live as well, which is looking at day services. So basically, any project like this is going to take a very long time to come to fruition, and our way of breaking into that is to start by seeing how we can plug into things the NHS don't already have. And through doing that, you build, basically, evidence and a cohort of people, and the plan is then to build it up. One project is a planning application in Wales for a site which we have a peppercorn rent on; the other is looking at a pop up where we can do things like forest bathing and all of the principles of Homestead around therapeutic design we can apply on a day basis. And we're also helping to develop design guidelines to help The Maudsley with any projects coming forward, so that good design and therapeutic design has a voice within the design and planning system. 

The other two projects that jumped out at me were the new Watford market, and Bollo Lane. Can you tell me a little bit about both those projects? 

Yes, Watford market was one of the first projects I brought into the office, actually, and that is amazing; ten years prior, I'd worked on Camden Lock market, so really a brilliant opportunity to kind of build on that. It is a genuinely collocated scheme. It's town centre, middle of Watford. The market has moved around a lot, but in its current location, whilst it's got amazing independent occupiers, it's been a little bit abandoned, and this is an opportunity to look at that kind of symbiotic need for residential accommodation alongside a new, recalibrated market. The site is the linchpin of the station and the town. So, in public realm and modelling terms, binding everything back together, but a genuine example of 24-hour intergenerational living, where you've got culture and community and different tenures of housing all coming together, in a very prime spot. 

And then over at Acton, Bollo Lane, that's a Passivhaus scheme? 

Yes. The practice has a long history of working for Barrett and this has been an amazing project which actually spans two things. We're looking at standard details for them. But Bollo Lane, Acton, is a masterplan where we are actually actively at scale, basically delivering Barrett's first Passivhaus scheme – the largest roll-out of Passivhaus homes in the UK within a residential-led mixed use development, alongside Places for People. So, it's a collaboration between both of them. 

And finally, when I first met you, I think you were at McAslan's, and we talked about Architects Aware!, which was your think tank that you set up to address homelessness, which was fascinating at the time, and I wondered if there's been an update on that in the time since? 

Yes. It's interesting to talk about this now, because obviously that was formed, I think maybe eight years ago, and we were very active as a group in the space, looking at all angles of how we challenge, or how we tackle homelessness in the built environment. And however, many years on, it's quite sad to see that I can see the same conversation circling. The group got a little bit quiet, for various reasons, part of which was me kind of trying to build another business, which took a lot of my attention. But actually, we're now collaborating with Paul Klein, author of Change for Good, and founder of Impact, to do a big event in October. It will be a cross-sector working forum focused on turning ideas into implementable solutions for affordable housing for vulnerable youth. The group has now actually reformed to support that, and also to bring together all of our kind of collective knowledge to go back to industry and offer advice. 

How do you think, in the meantime, the problem of homelessness has been exacerbated, or otherwise? I presume it's not got much better. 

Yeah, I think all of these things are quite political. We look at statistics, and you can present them in many different ways. I mean, it's really good that there's a lot more conversation about it, and there are more ideas and thinking going forward, but stepping back from that and looking at how many things are actually being built to address this, ultimately, that hasn't changed significantly. So, I think that there's so much complexity around why it doesn't come forward. And I think where I'd like to see conversations going are, you know, we all know the problem, and it is important to talk about it, but what is that collective effort needed to really address this issue at scale? You know, I could talk about things like cuts and all these sorts of political issues. Other than in the pandemic, we haven't seen a kind of systemic response to homelessness. And the numbers, as you say, are getting worse. 

And with the economic crisis, as well, looming, I presume that's an added problem that forces more people onto the streets? 

Yes, exactly. Funding is scarcer. We're not building as much as we were anyway, just on core infrastructure. And I think, at any time that the economy is in trouble, these things that are seen as additional when they should be seen as kind of core infrastructure fall by the wayside. 

Last question: if there was a way of characterising the work of Makower Architects, what would that be in a couple of sentences? What's the sort of ethos of the business and the designs that it produces? 

Tim and I often talk about the kind of intersection of what we call contextual urbanism, which is, well, contextual urbanism and community health. And what that really means is making places that endure and last. And that, again, comes from that kind of wider master planning community background of looking at the city as a whole, rather than a site in isolation, and then saying, how does this serve? And then the community health element being: they're always asking the question, how do our proposals or anything that we might implement make people's lives healthier and make it better for the community? So, it's really looking at that intersection and that lens, regardless of the brief, at all times.  For me, the success for the practice will be the ability to demonstrate that design can directly improve health outcomes - creating places that reduce inequality and support human flourishing. Not just good buildings, but better cities, driven by influencing thinking beyond individual projects into policy and wider systems.  

Well, Thank you very much for your time. Congratulations on the role, and good luck with it all. 

Thanks so much! Nice chatting to you! Bye.