Lion Green Road, a council housing development in Croydon, won the Stirling Prize 2026, the main British architecture award. By then the client, whom Mary Duggan called amazing, no longer existed. Brick by Brick, the company owned by the council, was liquidated after Croydon went bankrupt.
The council finished the houses itself. Then the whole complex was sold to the Regen Capital fund for £38 million, and it is now called Red Clover Gardens. The council kept a long lease on 85 social apartments, which it lets to a housing association.
Lion Green Road was an outsider. Bookmakers gave it 6/1, the least favoured of the six finalists. The favourite was thought to be Haworth Tompkins' extension of Pembroke College in Cambridge. For Duggan this is the first Stirling Prize shortlist at all. Housing rarely gets the prize: in 30 years this is the fourth time.
The project started in 2016, so the award came ten years later. The site used to be a car park, which the council had already declared surplus in 2012, and an empty, run-down Sovereign House. There was already permission for a supermarket with a medical centre, but in January 2016 the joint venture of the council and John Laing decided not to build it.
The site drops 8 metres in height. At the back it borders an abandoned railway embankment, which is now protected as a heritage site. Duggan started from the idea that the greenery around has value and costs nothing, so she built the project from the landscape. She calls it a "gift of the land."
