Merry Christmas from everyone at URBED!

This year has been an incredible one for URBED! We were delighted with the announcement of our proposal winning the 2014 Wolfson Economics Prize, which has taken David all around the world to speak at scores of events. We would like to take the opportunity to thank our collaborators, friends and family for supporting us throughout the year.We have thoroughly enjoyed working with Sam Brandt, Anna Wang, Sally Parekh, Esme Walker, Niloufar Bayat, and Paul Kirschstein. We have recently taken on Jess Peng on an educational scholarship and we look forward to welcoming our newest staff member Vicky Payne, who will be joining us as a planner in the new year.The project work in the office again varied greatly in scale in 2014. We were the lead urban designer on the planning submission of a mixed use masterplan in Bradford, known as New Bolton Woods, which the office has worked on for a number of years and we continue to work on the masterplan for Ouseburn along with a number of fantastic architects.We successfully secured planning permission for Trent Basin, and are continuing to work on this site for the sustainable developer Bblueprint. This masterplan has been shortlisted for an Urban Design Group award of which you'll hear more about in the next few months.We also began work on a mixed-use masterplan in Sharpness, Gloucestershire for the Canal and River Trust. Finally, it was exciting to hear the Pitcairn and Hobart scheme in Nottingham is well on its way to completion and the first homes are now being sold.We continue work on Whole House Retrofits and are currently developing a range of assessment methods and tools to enable householders and organisations to assess their current energy use and plan towards retrofit projects. We have also been invited to act as Squash Nutrition's Architect on their scheme in Liverpool which is expected to go into planning soon. Details of these and many more projects can be found on our website: urbed.coop

Coming up in 2015...

We are looking forward to a busy 2015 with masterplanning work in Nottingham, Sunderland, Gloucestershire and Penistone. We have also been commissioned on several architectural studies for community groups in Manchester and Liverpool including Homebaked, Squash Nutrition, LGBT Youth North West and Uprising Bakery. Next year will also see us curate a pavilion as one of four international design practices as part of the Architektur Sommer Rhein-Main 2015 in Frankfurt, Germany.We are also thrilled to start arranging the next 4x4 Manchester events which will be held in March 2015. If you would like to be kept informed of these events, just sign up to the mailing list here.

UDG Practice Award 2015:We are delighted to be shortlisted for the Urban Design Group Practice award with our masterplan for Trent Basin. The winner from the shortlist of four practices will be announced at an awards ceremony early next year. See more information here.