Bath firm wins top design prize

A housing scheme designed by a Bath firm and dubbed a modern-day Coronation Street has won Britain's most prestigious architectural award.

Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios was one of three architects firms behind Accordia in Cambridge, which features terraced houses without gardens and which at the weekend won the Stirling Prize.

The estate includes houses of up to six bedrooms for £1m as well as terraced houses and mews apartments.

The development has roof terraces and communal playing areas rather than individual gardens.

The winning development - the first housing scheme to be given the prize - was announced by TV presenter Kevin McCloud and Royal Institute of British Architects president Sunand Prasad.

The Grand Designs broadcaster said: "This project lays down a marker, a new benchmark for housing."

The firm's senior partner Keith Bradley said the win was "fantastic."

"It's vitally important that a housing project has won. This is the architecture that people experience on a daily basis and it's great that quality can be recognised like this."

Batheaston-based FCB Studios is also the architect behind the 2,000-home Western Riverside housing development for derelict land in Bath.

The judging panel described the scheme as "high-density housing at its very best."

"[It provides] a new model for outside-inside life with interior roofspaces, internal courtyards and large semi-public community gardens," they added, saying it offered  children a safe place to play where cars are "tamed not banned".

"It is architecture which gives hope for us all for the future."

Mr Bradley added: "A lot of mistakes were made in the past - not all the fault of architects, but architects were party to that: put all the same sort of people in the same place. It never works."

FCB Studios was originally appointed as sole architects, but invited two other practices, Alison Brooks and Maccreanor Lavington, to collaborate.