Journal

Our last four applications in Somerset averaged thirty-one weeks to decision. We counted, because we keep a spreadsheet, and because all four were consented without a single committee objection. Thirteen weeks would have saved our clients real money. So no complaints about the target itself.

The worry is what gets cut to hit it. The quiet casualties of every speed reform since 2013 have been the same: design review panels, conservation officers, and the pre-application meeting where an experienced officer says “the massing is wrong” early enough to matter. Committees rarely slow good schemes; mostly they weed out bad ones. Remove the weeding and the average gets worse, quickly and for decades.

Our ask is unfashionable: keep design review, staff it properly, and pay planning officers what the job is worth. Speed and quality are not opposites — but only one of them is being measured.

The library started in 2020, when Priya Nair refused to specify another product from a PDF. It now runs the length of the studio's north wall: 340 samples, each labelled with supplier, unit cost, embodied-carbon figure and — where we have used it — the project number and how it has weathered since. The reclaimed pennant stone from Hartcliffe sits next to the brick slips we rejected for Kingsdown, with the rejection note attached. Failures stay on the shelf; they are the most useful part.

From April we are opening the library on the first Friday of every month, 8.30 to 11.00, at 14 Anchor Road. Students, neighbours, self-builders and other practices are all welcome. Bring nothing, take notes, argue with our labels. The coffee is from Small Street and it is good.

The argument, compressed: every building is a store of carbon, labour and permission that took decades to accumulate, and demolition spends all three in an afternoon. Keeping the Malthouse's shell saved roughly 4,000 tonnes of brick from a skip and eighteen months of programme against a comparable new build. Those numbers did more work in the planning committee than any adjective.

The fifth case study was a 1974 office block in Swindon we declined to gut in 2022, because the frame could not honestly take the loads the client needed. Retrofit first is a discipline, not a dogma; the survey decides, not the slogan.

All forty slides were drawings — no renders, one photograph. The school has the recording; email the events office at the school for the link. Thanks to the 340 students who stayed past the fire alarm.

The frame is 61 tonnes of Austrian spruce in 212 cross-laminated panels, storing roughly 112 tonnes of CO₂ for as long as it stands. It went up in eleven weeks with a crew of five and one tower crane, inside a listed shell with 400 mm of clearance at the tightest pass. The setting-out survey paid for itself on day three.

Four millimetres of cumulative error over thirty-one metres is the best result this practice has recorded, and the credit belongs to the frame contractor's setting-out engineer, who checked every pad twice and trusted nobody's datum, including ours.

The spruce branch on panel 212 is the carpenters' tradition: the building gets a crown, the crew gets a meal. Both were honoured. Completion is programmed for spring 2025; the building opened its doors, on programme, the following September.