Some time in the early 1990s, a group of tenants from the Hulme council estate in Manchester sat in the local project office to interview architects. Throughout the day practices turned up, parking amid the travellers’ buses in the car park, smoke rising from their wood-burning stoves, and picking their way through the litter-strewn verge, not sure what to expect.

The tenants were from the Homes for Change cooperative, who had set three criteria to guide their choice of architect: a willingness to work collaboratively, a commitment to sustainability and an ability to produce bloody good architecture. Rather than appoint a community architect, the head-strong group decided that they could teach architects to consult, and even about sustainability, but they couldn’t make them good designers. So, the architects who were interviewed, (one of whom turned up in a Porsche) had generally never done this type of thing before.

Over the next few years the coop worked with George Mills and Ian Beaumont – the M and B of MBLC Architects – to create an amazing building. They spent happy afternoons photocopying schemes from the office library to make “mood” boards of what they wanted. They visited interesting schemes and ran workshops, including one where the building was modelled in plasticine. It was fraught with difficulty but the resulting building was a truly joint effort.

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