The UK Design Capital of the Year Award recognises and celebrates outstanding leadership in architecture, placemaking and regeneration. Launched in 2025 as part of the Architect of the Year Awards, this accolade looks beyond individual projects and buildings to acknowledge cities showing strategic ambition in shaping their built environment, from long-term masterplans to bold urban experiments.
Across the four cities shortlisted this year – Bradford, Cardiff, York and Plymouth – architects, planners and civic leaders are testing ideas that could set benchmarks for urban growth across the UK. In the third of this year’s series, Daniel Gayne visits Plymouth to discover how the ground is being laid to retrofit a 10,000-home new town in the centre of Britain’s Ocean City.
In the flickering greyscale film, stern-faced men in overalls and cloth caps stream out of the gates. “You’d think this was Manchester or Bury or Middlesbrough,” remarks the man beside me in the museum. But the video is not of any of those places. I’m watching archive footage of Plymouth with a senior figure in the city council in its popular new arts museum, The Box.
The moment sums up something about the city’s current conjuncture. Once dominated by the dockyards and light industry, it was hit hard by the deindustrialisation of the 1980s, before recent decades saw it attempt the painful pivot from industrial doldrums to the kind of knowledge economy regeneration that has transformed the centres of northern cities like Manchester.
But in 2026, Britain’s Ocean City, as it calls itself, stands on the brink of what is likely to be a truly transformative period. While many of the commercial dockyards declined at the end of the 20th century, the Navy never left Plymouth, and HMNB Devonport in the west of the city remains the largest military shipyard in western Europe.
“Plymouth’s growth and boom periods have, whether we like it or not, been aligned with the military. And now we are going into another,” says Martin Ivatt, city-centre programme director at the city council and the man accompanying me around The Box. The port, which is the sole nuclear repair and refuelling facility for the Royal Navy, has been lined up for a £4.4bn investment from central government.
With this huge investment comes the need for a lot more homes and services to sustain the expected rise in jobs, as well as an opportunity to spread the economic benefits of Plymouth’s military significance outside the secure border of the naval base. To achieve this, the city council is embarking on a radical plan for a new town-scale development of 10,000 homes in the city centre, and has commissioned WSP with the support of Howells and Mae to deliver a vision for it.
The mixed legacy of Abercrombie’s post-war plan for Plymouth
If you think that the middle of a city sounds like a weird place for a new town, you might need a lesson about Plymouth’s planning history.
The city was ravaged by German bombs during the Second World War, with more than 75,000 buildings destroyed. But the authority at the time opted against rebuilding the city as it had been, instead commissioning Sir Patrick Abercrombie to draw up a radical plan for a new city centre.
The result had all the hallmarks of post-war modernist planning – a zoned, low-density vision along the garden city model, while what remained of the city centre would be demolished to make way for wide boulevards set across a neat grid, lined with grand beaux-arts blocks to house city-centre retail.
There is a lot to be celebrated in the urban core Plymouth inherited from Abercrombie. The central avenue, Armada Way, which runs from the train station down to the municipal centre and up again onto the Hoe, provides a dramatic, sweeping vista as you enter the city, while the Royal Parade is home to some handsome Portland stone buildings designed for banks, department stores and municipal services.
But the plan was never built out quite as intended. The quality of the architecture declines markedly the closer you get to the station on Armada Way. “Some of the sites are terrible; it’s really bad architecture,” says Alex Ely, founder director at Mae, which is focused on the city-core part of the new masterplan.
Meanwhile the tree-lined boulevards that Abercrombie had imagined surrounding the city core became concrete collars – a circle of six-lane highways choking off pedestrian access from the outer parts of the city centre.
What is more, the post-war approach to zoning left it hollowed out long before the age of Amazon, with residential density well below comparable cities, and many of those grand post-war buildings underutilised. The grade II-listed Royal Bank of Scotland building, which was built in the 1950s, recently had its gorgeous blue mosaic restored but remains empty. “They need a bit of tender love and care, but they’re actually quite fine architecture,” says Ely.
In the city core, Mae looks to improve what works and and reimagine what doesn’t
The need to deal with this complex legacy has long been recognised locally. The Mackay Plan of 2002 stressed the need to bring a mix of uses back to the city core, but its vision of a mini-Manhattan-on-Sound has not aged well into an era of higher-risk buildings and ingrained nimbyism. Plymouth’s one contemporary tall building, Beckley Point, is a rather unlovely student accommodation building and did not seem widely appreciated by anyone I spoke to.
By contrast, the Plymouth City Living Framework now under development will aim to “improve what works in the Abercrombie plan, but look to then reimagine other parts that don’t”, in the words of Ely at Mae. In the city core, that means a “more European type city of mid-rise”, keeping to, and in some cases realising for the first time, the six- to eight-storey development that Abercrombie had envisaged.
In the city’s inner core, this is likely to mean retrofitting brilliant but unloved buildings, with the addition of extra storeys where possible. This has already been done in a few places, with mixed architectural success. Derry’s department store has with relative subtlety gained additional height and is now home to a Premier Inn hotel, while the curvaceous former Post Office building has also been extended vertically. The former Barclays Bank, however, looks a little like a grade-II listed classical building wearing an unremarkable two-storey office as a hat.
At the very centre point of the city, where Armada Way meets Royal Parade, several major developments are in the works. Babcock, a defence engineering firm that plays a major role over in Devonport, plans to move thousands of jobs into the centre of town through its planned refurbishment of the House of Fraser building, while the council is playing its own role with its plans to redevelop the old Civic Centre – the only truly tall building built as part of the Abercrombie plan and a fine piece of modernist design by city architect Hector Stirling, with help from Jellicoe, Ballantyne & Coleridge and Ove Arup.
Case study: Civic Centre
Once the heart of Plymouth’s municipal services, today the Civic Centre is empty but for the pigeons and asbestos. A 2007 listing saved it from destruction – to the consternation of some and the joy of others – but also scuppered a planned sale to a private developer. It was subsequently sold to Urban Splash, before being returned to council ownership for just £1 after the developer decided its plans for the tower were not viable.
But the council has big ideas for the building. Proposals drawn up by BDP, currently going through planning, would see the building essentially divided, with the podium level turned into a college and the tower becoming apartments.
Strip-out work to deal with the asbestos problem is ongoing, and there are plans to add a new lift shaft to facilitate the installation of a commercial kitchen in the top floor.
Some ugly later additions to the podium level will be demolished to re-establish the original sightlines through the base of the structure, while new lightwells will bring illumination to lower-ground spaces. A new staircase core will also have to be added for building safety reasons. Homes England has granted £18m to the scheme, but it will need a bit more public money to get it over the line.
Walking around the building is a rather bleak experience right now, but through the dinginess nice little details poke out. The terrazzo-finish floor and Ashburton marble columns on the ground floor and the red mosaic pilotis outside will make for fine details on a refurbished building. The waffle-style concrete ceiling, pleasing to today’s cheerleaders of brutalism, will be kept open within the apartments, while the old panel facade system will be replaced by a new one with a similar style but improved thermal performance.
Further north, some of the less handsome buildings will probably be demolished and rebuilt. Homes England and the council signed a memorandum of understanding in June 2025, following which the UK housing agency bought three derelict sites at the top of Armada Way, which will be demolished later this year to make way for a housing-led scheme that the council is calling Armada Way North.
After controversy, council delivers smart new public realm in city centre
To pave the way for the new masterplan, the council has already invested heavily to improve the public realm in the city centre, with £30m spent on an overhaul of Armada Way and further spending on nearby streets. The central boulevard and its offshoots were pedestrianised in the 1980s. Previously, it was lined with a corridor of mature trees with heavy foliage.
The council’s view was that the existing landscaping encouraged anti-social behaviour and blocked the dramatic view down to the Hoe, and it claims the trees were nearing the end of their natural lives. However, they were well loved by some locally, and the plans for Armada Way provoked controversy that spilled over into outrage when some of the trees were cut down overnight.
The scandal led to the resignation of the council leaders and is thought to have contributed to the change of administration, from Conservative to Labour, in the 2023 local elections. The campaign group set up to oppose the felling, Save the Trees of Armada Way – or STRAW – disputes the council’s original claims about the need to replace the trees and continues to exist and campaign against felling elsewhere in the city.
This aside, the new scheme – which opened in July – viewed solely on its own merits, is impressive. The half-kilometre stretch, built by Morgan Sindall, features 176 newly planted trees, wildflower planting, one of the largest city-centre play areas in the country and a sustainable drainage system that provides an attractive water feature while protecting the ecology of Plymouth Sound in the event of a rare flooding incident. The scheme succeeds in its goals of opening up views through the centre of the city and breaking up the thoroughfare for a variety of uses.
The masterplanners are likely to recommend further public realm interventions at the edge of the city core – its concrete collar – in order to link it up better with the rest of the city. On the eastern edge is the university quarter, an area with several pieces of high-quality contemporary architecture commissioned by the city’s universities, including Henning Larsen Architects’ and BDP’s striking Roland Levinsky building, Feilden Clegg Bradley Studio’s Babbage Building, and The Box designed by AtkinsRéalis.
“We want to break that [barrier] down because there’s a really high footfall between the two,” says the city council’s Ivatt of the core and university quarter, adding: “On the other side, we have Stonehouse, which is one of the most deprived wards in the country. From a social mobility and accessibility point of view, breaking down that six-lane road can only be a good thing.”
The plan is still in its early stages, but Ely talks about creating “a better relationship between pedestrian flow, vehicular flow, crossings, and landscape” and points to Nottingham’s Maid Marian Way as a source of inspiration.
Outside Abercrombie, Howells aims to recreate a polycentric Plymouth
Responsibility for developing the masterplan for the wider city centre – from Stonehouse to Cattedown, Coxside, and Sutton Harbour – falls to Howells. It is likely that many of the 10,000 homes will be here, with Ely saying the city core itself will “take what it can”. But this part of the plan is about more than dumping new housing blocks across the rest of the city.
Glenn Howells, founding partner of Howells, who was once a student in the city, emphasises it is about “repairing the urban fabric” that Abercrombie bulldozed, by “reconnecting all the old towns which made up Plymouth”. The city is, after all, less than a century old, having previously been a cluster of towns like Stonehouse, Cattedown and Devonport, as well as old Plymouth itself.
“Mentally people have shrunk the city centre down to the triangle which is the Abercrombie area, and it’s not sufficient and it’s not rich enough to promote the growth they need,” says Howells. His aim is to help nudge the city back towards the kind of polycentric model that existed 100 years ago.
He says there are plenty of infill sites and larger patches of brownfield on which new homes can be built and that the goal is to “create walkable districts where there’s lots of front doors and local amenities”. In Stonehouse, he envisions “compact terraced housing and maybe walk-up apartment buildings” of between two and four storeys, but he says the typology will vary across the city.
Timeline: The development of Plymouth’s urban fabric since the Blitz
1943: Abercrombie Plan sets out vision
1962: Modernist Plymouth Civic Centre built
1980s: Pedestrianisation of the city centre
2003: David Mackay develops bold masterplan aiming to double city-centre population and improve waterfront
2007: Civic Centre listed to prevent its demolition
2017: Strategic masterplans developed by LDA Design and WSP lay groundwork for public realm improvements in the city centre and the waterfront
2023: Controversy over felling of trees at Armada Way sees collapse of council’s Conservative administration
2026: City council commissions new masterplan and opens new Armada Way
Of the areas Howells is tasked with looking at, it is Stonehouse that has seen the most intensive regeneration in recent years. Urban Splash has spent more than two decades transforming Royal William Yard, a defunct victualling depot for the Royal Navy on a spit of land known as Devil’s Point, into a new community of 250 homes and 120,000ft² of workspace with ground-floor retail and leisure. Nearby, the English Cities Fund is halfway through redeveloping 9ha at Millbay.
Both schemes feature some very fine architecture, although of quite different styles. Alastair Carswell, director at Ferguson Mann Architects, a Bristol-based practice that has worked on both, explains that Royal William Yard, originally designed by Sir John Rennie in the 1830s, was simply a question of “opening up and showing off the structure and some of the original trusses”. Millbay, meanwhile, is “deliberately modernist and quite contemporary as a new sort of urban quarter”. It features a range of building types, including two large apartment blocks called Cargo 1 and Cargo 2, as well as a row of townhouses in West Hoe Road, which Howells describes as “a really useful starting point” for further development.
But the redevelopment of the Stonehouse area has been piecemeal and incomplete. Royal William Yard is a pleasant and attractive neighbourhood, thrumming with activity from its workplace tenants, a mix of creative industry firms and engineering and technology companies from Babcock’s supply chain. But it is a rather upmarket and self-contained enclave that feels detached from the rest of the area.
Millbay is more in the thick of things, but is fundamentally unfinished. Carswell says part of the aim was to “extend an element” of the hustle and bustle of Sutton Harbour to the other side of Hoe, but Clyde Quay – the waterside element of the scheme which he describes as its “commercial heart” – remains for now a grassy field.
Millbay could be in the mix for early interventions in the city-centre framework, alongside the Civic Centre and Armada Way North, but to truly succeed, the masterplan must spread benefits to the wider area. Only a little further north is Union Street. The road that linked the old cluster of towns, providing a sort of linear city centre, was once the nightlife capital of the region, but has become associated with closed-down and, in some cases, burnt-out buildings. It has so far missed out on waves of regeneration investment and frustrated locals have been left to fill the gaps.
Over the past eight years, Nudge Community Builders, a community benefit society, has brought 25% of the empty buildings on Union Street back into use. This includes turning a closed-down 24-hour pub into a cafe and marketplace, with two affordable flats upstairs, and the conversion of a nightclub into an urban farm, with further work ongoing to provide other uses in the building. Its latest challenge is bringing the Millennium, a huge 1930s cinema, back into use as a music and arts venue.
Repositioning the city through arts and culture
The challenge of post-industrial malaise and town centres overly focused on retail is recognisable across the country. Plymouth has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform itself with the defence funding set to pour into the city, but it will need to look beyond that sector if it is to grow sustainably.
Fortunately, the city has a burgeoning reputation in arts and culture. The Arts University Plymouth is one of the top-rated arts specialist universities in the country, and the Theatre Royal is a nationally significant destination for touring shows.
Meanwhile museum and gallery The Box, which was created from the merger of several cultural organisations in the city, has proved a smash hit. The £48m scheme, designed by AtkinsRéalis and opened in 2021, receives around 300,000 visitors a year, compared with the 80,000 recorded by its predecessor. Earlier this year, it was named the Art Fund Museum of the Year.
“Culture really helps the city reposition itself,” says The Box chief executive Victoria Pomery. “We’ve got the defence deal coming, which will mean further investment in the city. But a city is more than just a place of defence – it has to be, if you want it to be vibrant and dynamic and a great place to live, work and play.”
Plymouth’s growing cultural clout is attracting attention from arty developers that might not previously have considered it. Alma Yard, a former window factory in the east of the city, has been sensitively converted into office and studio spaces by Eat Work Art, a creative workspace provider based in Hackney which hand-picks tenants to establish a creative community within its schemes.
Designed by local practice Ayres Haynes Architects, Alma Yard is another example of letting the heritage speak for itself – with a beautiful rope-pulley vehicle lift turned into the centrepiece of a co-working space and the major intervention across the development being the replacement of the outdoor tarmac surfaces with cobblestones.
This is Eat Work Art’s first foray outside of London, which Kate Pierce, development and strategy manager, says was a “big move” driven by the company’s assessment of Plymouth as an “inherently creative city”.
Ayres Haynes director Jon Bovey says another attraction of Plymouth is its natural gifts, sandwiched as it is between the sea and the moors. “We have a lot of clients who move here for the lifestyle,” he says. “A lot of people literally bring their businesses with them.”
Building on the city’s natural charms and its emerging hubs of creative industry, Plymouth’s ambitious council has the opportunity with this new masterplan to build something really spectacular on England’s south-west coast. It will be judged on whether it can go beyond attracting cash and creativity from elsewhere and actually improve life for people living in places such as Union Street. If it can successfully harness the energy and ideas of organisations like Nudge, it might just have a chance to do that.
Key players
Stride Treglown: This employee-owned practice is one of the bigger architectural firms to have a permanent office in Plymouth. It has a thick portfolio of public sector work in the city, including Meadow View care facility and the sleek new Park Crematoria. It is also working on a new six-storey emergency care building, in the Derriford neighbourhood in the north of the city. The £200m scheme is one of the first under the current wave of the New Hospital Programme.
British Land: As the owner of a large amount of retail space in the city core, it will be an essential partner in delivering the council’s emerging vision. It previously partnered with the local authority to deliver The Barcode, a big retail and leisure scheme on an old coach depot site.
Building Plymouth: This council-led partnership was launched in 2015 to connect local people with career opportunities in the built environment to help build the new Plymouth.
Homes England: The agency and its regional predecessors were essential to the development of both Royal William Yard and Millbay and are now working with the council to deliver Armada Way North.
Nudge Community Builders: This local organisation is pioneering a different form of regeneration, putting empty buildings in the area into community use.
Gillespie Yunnie: This Devon-based practice took the baton from Ferguson Mann on the Royal William Yard scheme and has led much of the design of that scheme. It also worked on Urban Splash’s ultimately abandoned plans for the Civic Centre.
About the UK Design Capital of the Year
UK Design Capital of the Year is an award run by Building Design as part of the Architect of the Year Awards. Now in its second year, it recognises cities leading the way in architecture, placemaking and regeneration – looking beyond individual buildings to celebrate places where strategic ambition is reshaping the built environment.
Bradford, Cardiff, Plymouth and York have been shortlisted for the title this year. Over the coming months, Building Design’s editorial team will visit and profile each city in depth, speaking to civic leaders, clients and designers to assess the strength of their urban strategies.
A high-profile panel of built environment experts first helped identify the shortlist; they will reconvene later in the year as final judges. Cities are assessed against five criteria: strategic vision and leadership; quality of design and placemaking; delivery and momentum; innovation and experimentation; and regeneration and economic transformation.
The winner will be announced at the Architect of the Year Awards ceremony on 7 October. Last year’s inaugural title was awarded to Manchester.
Postscript
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