Norwich eco-council estate wins Stirling Prize 2019 for Britain’s best new building

The prize for Britain’s best new building has been won by a council estate for the first time.

Goldsmith Street in Norwich, a group of 105 eco-friendly homes commissioned by the local authority, saw off competition from five other shortlisted schemes to claim the 2019 Stirling Prize, awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba).

It is the largest development in the UK to meet the demanding Passivhaus international energy performance standard, which is expected to reduce fuel bills by as much as 70 per cent.

Though it was hot favourite to win, Goldsmith Street, which was designed by Mikhail Riches with Cathy Hawley, pipped some notable large-scale projects.

They included the £1 billion project at London Bridge station by Grimshaw and the £140 million Macallan Distillery by Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners in Speyside.

Also shortlisted were a small home built almost entirely of cork on an island in the Thames at Eton, by Matthew Barnett Howland, and a visitor centre and gallery at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park by Feilden Fowles. An opera house, by Witherford Watson Mann, hidden within a listed 17th-century stable block at a stately home in Leicestershire, completed the list.

The Goldsmith Street project, which took ten years to complete, consists of seven terraces modelled on houses in the Victorian Golden Triangle district, an affluent area often referred to as Norwich’s Notting Hill. It has generous communal spaces to foster a sense of community. Fashioned from cream-coloured bricks and glossy black roof tiles, in a nod to the city’s Dutch trading links, it has south-facing windows and rooms to make the most of sunlight.

“Faced with the worst housing crisis for generations and crippling local authority cuts, Goldsmith Street is a beacon of hope,” Alan Jones, the Riba president, said. “It is commended not just as a transformative housing scheme and eco-development but a pioneering exemplar for other local authorities to follow.”

Goldsmith Street also won the first Neave Brown Award, for outstanding social housing, in memory of the Royal Gold Medal-winning architect who designed the Alexandra Road Estate in Camden, north London.