Lion Green Road, a 157-home development in Coulsdon, south London, has won the 2026 Stirling Prize, the UK’s most prestigious architecture award. Designed by Mary Duggan Architects with RUFF Architects, the project combines affordable and private housing for Croydon Council across five distinctive 13-sided blocks.
The development replaced a former car park on a steep site with an eight-metre change in level. Its landscape-led plan uses winding paths, retained trees, shared outdoor areas, a bluebell woodland, a sensory garden, allotments and play spaces to connect the buildings with open parkland.
The blocks sit among trees near green-belt land and use soft purple and pink brickwork to fit into the surrounding landscape.
The scheme challenged conventional suburban layouts based on roads, private gardens and clearly separated front and back spaces. Instead, its public and private outdoor areas form a hierarchy shaped by the site’s topography, with shared amenity space extending between the apartment clusters and linking the development to parkland to the north.
RIBA president Chris Williamson praised the project as a new approach to higher-density development and said its design created a connection between Lion Green Road and the green space beyond. The jury described it as an inventive, site-specific response to a highly constrained plot.