Finding joy working as a public sector architect

An Alum of our Associate Programme, Matt Brown, wrote this joyful and honest article for the first issue of our annual magazine, Public Notice. It details his time working at the London Borough of Croydon and Bristol City Council, including the ups, downs and everyday challenges of working in the public sector.

I have days when I miss designing. Sometimes, I’d like to spend the afternoon drawing up a joinery package or making models. This tends to happen when the bureaucracy of public sector work reaches its peak, and I’ll probably have just seen a nice project on Instagram. But these feelings are becoming rare as my career ebbs and flows towards something I’ve been seeking for some time: becoming a public sector client and finding joy as a custodian of the public estate.

But I also love learning about planning, finance, art, consultation, engagement, ecology, policy and procurement. At architecture school, I was preoccupied with how these forces shape the built environment – and felt most inspired by practitioners who acknowledged this in their work rather than ignoring it.

I was lucky to have support from sympathetic practices who created space for my wider exploration whilst mentoring my development as an architect. At public works, BPTW, Freehaus, and East, I had a wide array of project types that ensured I maintained a broad understanding of design. I nurtured these interests by working on art commissions that addressed the built environment, like doing drawings of the London Housing Design Guide at 1:1 and building performance architecture projects with Alex Schweder.

Through Public Practice, my interest in the metropolitan centre of Croydon led to a role in Croydon Council’s placemaking team, where I started to understand the breadth of work councils do and how different each day can be.

I loved suddenly being in a room where decisions were being made. Things like how competitions were going to be run and how engagement on a local plan review would be approached. I regularly reviewed and discussed designs as a design officer, reviewing developments at the pre-application stage to help improve schemes through negotiation with developers and their consultant teams. This satisfied an underlying urge to talk about the design of window reveals and brick joints while pointing out where projects might not meet building regulations. In addition, I also managed the Croydon Design Review Panel – where I was continually immersed in discussions around design quality.

The Associate Programme and the brilliant multi-disciplinary placemaking team at Croydon Council provided me with a support network of people also interested in the dark matter around architecture.

During this period, I realised that I wanted to work on development projects more directly: procuring and managing design teams and project budgets, and all the other behind-the-scenes work that enables those glossy, award-winning, public sector-led projects to happen.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I relocated to Bristol and began a role as a Development Manager in Bristol’s Housing Delivery Team, which I am still doing today. The ‘Delivery’ part is incredibly broad. Alongside building council housing that is so desperately needed across the city, we often need to do significant enabling work like delivering public realm improvements or building new community infrastructure. The multidisciplinary team includes many backgrounds and specialist skills, and we work closely with many other teams across the council, from legal services to estate management, property to engineering, and arts development to community safety – the list is endless!

The work I do fluctuates between direct delivery and strategy development. Behind all of this are complex local government decision-making and approval processes, legal conundrums, and political briefings. Every day is different, and whilst it's mostly emails and meetings (is that the same for everyone?), I’ve been lucky to be involved in two area regeneration projects, which means I have spent a good deal of time working on-site closely with stakeholders and residents. This means I can occasionally justify doing some drawings in PowerPoint for a presentation. It’s not all shiny, and at times, local government processes can be exasperating. But I try to remember that rules are important. Great care needs to be taken with decisions that affect so many.

I’ve recently qualified as an architect. Several architecture schools I approached for my Part 3 course told me to go elsewhere as I didn’t have the right experience for their programmes. However, some schools did recognise my skills, and I learned a considerable amount I now see as critical to my role.

In 1985, the late great Colin Stansfield Smith, whose legacy at Hampshire County Council is still strongly felt in the area today, once wrote that ‘architects are the rightful custodians of the public estate because they have the capacity to introduce joy, imagination and wit into our environments¹’.

Colin Stansfield Smith was said to have a style of wearing down committees by going on relentlessly about something slightly off the point and finding ‘functional pegs on which to hang his arguments rather than the architectural reasons¹’. I don’t think I have Colin’s relentlessness and prefer being more of a chameleon – learning to speak different languages. The way we present the same project to senior officers, finance teams or residents can be completely different – even if the same goal at the end is to build someone a safe home or improve their public realm.

Last year, my team ran a procurement process for a Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) funded community centre expansion and refurbishment in Filwood Broadway, South Bristol. The project is at the heart of a £14.5m funding package of improvements that will be transformative for one of the most deprived wards in the country. As project lead, I was able to make the case that we needed to have an invited two-stage design competition to get a good team in place to deliver high quality and at pace. We had to provide significant justification to colleagues, but I eventually secured an honorarium payment for shortlisted teams.

I’m proud that the procurement process was picked up by the teams involved as being exemplary. Having been through competition processes from the bidding side, I had an idea of how exploitative these can be and how this often leads to underpaid assistants working late into the night.

I’m hopeful that we can continue to develop a reputation as a good client and that the principles we follow might have a broader impact on the industries we work with.

In time, I’d like us to aspire to the kinds of innovative procurement processes run by the Vlaams Bouwmeester's (Flemish Government Architect’s Department) Open Call process.

The DLUHC project in Filwood Broadway will keep me occupied for the next two years. Alongside the community centre retrofit, this will also involve housing, public realm and high street improvements. I am excited to work regularly on the ground with local stakeholders to deliver a vision that residents set in motion many years ago. Whilst I am the client contractually, the local residents and stakeholders in Filwood Broadway and Knowle West are the Council’s clients – and I hope to use my skills to push for the best possible outcomes from the funding the area has received to help achieve their vision.

From one perspective, this is about broadening the idea of what design is. The role of built environment practitioners, including architects, can be bigger than technical considerations. This role can also be designing the framework for a project or programme to be fair, equitable, and joyful and understanding how to embed this into every aspect of a project. To paraphrase Finn Williams, co-founder of Public Practice, sometimes you’ve got to design with a spreadsheet.

This article represents my views, not the views of Bristol City Council.