Inside the Firm Redesigning Britain’s High Streets From the Ground Up

In a former department store on the edge of a market town, a small team of architects is doing something the prevailing logic of property development suggests should be impossible: turning a building everyone had written off into something its community actually wants to be in.

The practice, founded eight years ago, has built its reputation on projects other architects decline — decaying civic buildings, contaminated industrial sites, unloved postwar infrastructure.

“Every building we’ve been given has been described to us as beyond saving,” says the director. “That is usually our cue that this is exactly the building we want to save.”