Lion Green Road, a council-commissioned housing scheme built on a former car park in Coulsdon, south London, has won the 2026 RIBA Stirling Prize, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) said. The winner was announced at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London on Thursday, October 15.

The scheme, designed by Mary Duggan Architects with RUFF Architects, provides 157 homes in five blocks, combining privately owned and socially rented homes for Croydon Council, according to the RIBA. The institute said the development provides homes for 635 residents.

A sloping site and a shared landscape

The site varies in height by eight meters, and the architects used its changing levels and views to arrange the blocks, the RIBA said. The buildings share one specification but are rotated and positioned to suit the topography, with some looking toward the Surrey Iron Railway, a historic monument. Every home is dual-aspect, and private balconies are placed to avoid looking directly into neighboring homes.

Outside, the scheme includes shared outdoor space, a public pathway, children’s play areas, a sensory trail and residents’ allotments. The project’s award page describes a landscape-led design of five pavilion buildings with a gross internal area of 12,260 square meters, linked to nearby parkland, woodland and gardens. It says mature trees were retained and that building elements were chosen “to maximise efficiencies in upfront and embodied carbon,” using modular construction, reduced structural weight, optimized foundations and careful construction sequencing.

The award page lists the client as Brick by Brick, which it says was set up in partnership with the London Borough of Croydon to deliver more socially equitable housing. The contractor was CField, and the landscape design was by Mary Duggan Architects with Planit.

What the jury said

Chris Williamson, the RIBA president, chaired the jury and announced the result on its behalf. “At a time when we urgently need to deliver more homes, Lion Green Road shows that density can be achieved without compromising the quality of the places we create,” he said. “Through a consistent specification, with subtle variation in height and orientation, it offers housing at scale without uniformity.”

Williamson added: “This is thoughtful, resourceful architecture that proves that even the most challenging of sites can be transformed into truly distinctive places for people to call home.”

Mary Duggan said: “We believe the significance of Lion Green Road lies in what it says about the future of housing: that architectural ambition, social value and generosity can co-exist within the realities of contemporary development.” She said the project’s “transformative values are not expressed through spectacle, but through the everyday experience” of living in a secure, generous environment.

The rest of the jury was Stephanie Macdonald of 6a architects, Tracy Meller of RSHP, Julie Godefroy, the jury’s sustainability specialist, Will Gompertz of Sir John Soane’s Museum and Catherine Winfield of Autodesk, according to the prize page.

The shortlist and other awards

Lion Green Road beat five other shortlisted buildings: a house at Fairmead, High Beach, in Epping Forest by Sergison Bates; BEAM in Hertfordshire by Bennetts Associates; Paddington Square in west London by Renzo Piano Building Workshop with Adamson Associates; Pembroke, Mill Lane, in Cambridgeshire by Haworth Tompkins; and the River Wing at Clare College, Cambridge, by Witherford Watson Mann Architects.

Several other RIBA awards were announced the same night. The RIBA International Prize went to the Green Field Factory of Karupannya Rangpur Limited in Bangladesh by Nakshabid Architects. The Neave Brown Award for Housing went to Rowan Court by Satish Jassal Architects. The Buttermarket by Architectural Thread won both the Stephen Lawrence Prize and the Conservation Award, and Oru Sutton by Samuel Chisholm Studio and Takero Shimazaki Architects won the Reinvention Award. York Minster was named Client of the Year for work by Tonkin Liu Architects.

The Stirling Prize was first awarded in 1996, and 2026 marks its 30th anniversary. Recent winners include the Elizabeth line (2024), the John Morden Centre by Mæ (2023) and Goldsmith Street by Mikhail Riches (2019).

Why it matters

The RIBA describes the Stirling Prize as the UK’s most prestigious architecture award, and this year it went to a scheme of council-commissioned homes. The jury’s statement framed the choice around the need to build more homes and the argument that higher density need not reduce the quality of the places created.

For councils and developers, the scheme offers a documented example of mixed-tenure housing on a difficult, sloping suburban plot, with a repeated building design adapted to the site. The RIBA’s pages set out the design and construction choices, including the carbon measures, but do not give cost or energy-performance figures.

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