Lindsay Cruddas, head of the Architecture team here at PDP looks back on the past 12 months, which saw some new appointments, some new legislation and an interesting portfolio of projects.
The A team
Our architectural team has thrived this year and has worked on many different projects with several clients and changes to the team members.
We started the year with Tina Humphreys becoming registered with ARB as a fully-fledged architect and Siegfried Doering retiring, (who has had many vacations since) and David Symons holding the helm whilst Lindsay Cruddas was on maternity leave. In April we welcomed Beth White, a Part II Architectural Assistant, into the Derby office, who is fantastic at 3D representations and loves Halloween and David had the greatest change of all, becoming a first time father.
During the Summer Lindsay returned to her directors role. In September, we saw the biggest changes to the team with two members of staff leaving to pastures new, Joe and Josh, and two new members joining us, Ethan Gill & Joella Hinsley, both Part I Architectural Assistants who have shown us great design flare and dedication to their architectural education and career progression. Also in September we had a great team building trip to Copenhagen, which was good timing for our two new recruits! We enjoyed a river cruise taking in the modern and historic sights of the Danish Capital, swam in the sea, enjoyed Danish culture and even saw a sloth.
In November we welcomed David Innes to the architecture team, an Architectural technician who has extensive experience in conservation and listed buildings.
Our architecture projects have had a heavy residential scope to them this year and ranged from small internal alterations for home owners, to class Q barn conversions for farmers through to conversion of Mills to flats for developers.
Changes to legislation
6th April 2024 marked the mandatory date for the changes to building regulations implementing the Building Safety Act 2022. This followed a 6 month transition period from October 2023.
Key changes are:
- Higher risk work can only be overseen by the HRB regulator, not the local authority or private building inspector
- building regulations lapses automatically after 3 years approval if the project hasn’t commenced
- duty holders are now required, client, principal contractor, principal designer, designers and contractors. These are not to be confused with the CDM, although they can be the same people. They have the duty to ensure all work complies with the relevant regulations and sign a competence declaration on completion
- duty holders are required to notify the building control body twice:
- at least 2 or 5 working days before intending to ‘start’ work (depending on if it’s a higher risk building or not)
- within 5 working days of the work ‘commenced’
In September we saw the final published report of the Grenfell Inquiry detailing 58 pages of recommendations which we anticipate a response from the government in early 2025.
In October the RIBA announced their building of the year, which was controversially awarded to the Elizabeth line, which the team were split about, due to its great design detail, but was it really an architectural project?!
Locally Derby City Council held their public consultation on the City Centre Design Guide, which is open for comments until Monday 13th January 2025. It is a comprehensive document, broken down into chapters detailing different aspects of the design of the city. The guide shows distinct areas of the city and shows some altered and extended boundaries to include for the increasing campus size of University of Derby around Agard Street.
The aim of the guide is to improve the quality of design, quality of building and therefore return a positive environment and attract investment and people to live and work in the City Centre.
Key architecture projects this year
Extension to dwelling in Swanwick
We were commission by the homeowners to extend their detached home, which sits over three storeys on a sloping landscape. Tina was the Project Architect and designed a 2 storey extension utilizing black brick and timber cladding. The building already had a balcony, so it was proposed to modernize this and extend to wrap across the new extension.
The lower ground floor accommodates a large living area which can extend out on to the garden and the first floor has a master suite bedroom with a glazed gable in an oak frame.
The project received planning permission and is currently out for tender.
Speedwell Mill
The client for this project is a local builder specialising in residential developments. The former mill building has most recently been used as commercial offices with Prior Approval gained under the Class MA permitted development rights for conversion to residential apartments. The building also benefited from a previous full planning approval for the demolition of the existing single storey rear extension and the construction of a three-storey rear extension.
Our involvement in the project began with updating the lapsed prior approval permission, before submitting a variation of conditions application to update the design of the extension to create a more efficient internal layout and to remove redundant external staircases. Alongside the planning tasks we have been developing a technical design package for the scheme including construction details to obtain building regulations approval for the scheme. This has involved managing a design team of third-party consultants including a Fire Engineer, Structural Engineer, Acoustician, Energy Assessor and MEP specialist.
Complementing our strategic planning and concept design services, Planning & Design Practice has an experienced team of technical designers able to take simple or complex from concept through to completion. 2024 has been a great year for this kind of work, and we are looking forward to seeing the result of this with several projects starting on site in 2025.
Residential Development in Wirksworth
The client for this project is Elmhurst Homes – a small-scale local developer with a focus on high quality design to deliver truly outstanding developments.
The project brief was to create a high-quality residential development within a well-connected location at a highly regarded address – Summer Lane, Wirksworth. The site is a very large domestic garden with significant potential for additional residential development.
A house type brief has been developed in relation to the local residential context and house styles of Wirksworth as well as a high-quality precedent study to develop a set of house types unique to this site.
The house types have then been overlaid to the spatial and access constraints of the site to create a balanced layout with a strong focus on landscape.
The layout aims to create a stepped continuation of the existing street scene with generous and well-planted frontages to each plot.
This is the type of project that exploits the multi-disciplinary talents of our team, bringing together strategic planning policy considerations and high-quality architectural design to unlock constrained sites. Planning & Design Practice has a long history of working with innovative house builders throughout Derbyshire and the East Midlands. 2024 has been a great year for building on these relationships, setting up 2025 as a year for taking a number of these projects through the detailed design stage with a view to starting on site over the summer.
Lindsay Cruddas, Director Specialist Conservation Architect, Planning & Design Practice Ltd
