Recently I was chatting with a dear family friend. Crispin is an architect, owner of LBR Architecture, a small practice near Norwich and one of the reasons I’m now an architect myself. When I was 15, with a very hazy idea of what architecture was, he gamely invited me for two weeks’ work experience in his four person office; which evolved into a whole summer of doing their filing before I settled on my A-level subjects. I took his encouragement and patience for granted at the time and am only recently realising how lucky I was to have such a friend; and how much clearer eyed than many I was about the realities of practice life before I started university.

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