In the mid-1960s and 1970s, when the UK was experiencing a post-war housing boom, Broadway Malyan worked on housing schemes with modern designs that innovated in how they integrated local materials and local proportions or how they sat within a heritage context.

We received our first Housing Design Award just 12 years after our foundation for a carefully designed scheme of modern features next to Marlow’s All Saints Church in Buckinghamshire.

During these decades, influenced by the Central European Modern Movement ideas, the UK saw the construction of modernist blocks of bright apartments surrounded by green open spaces across the country.

Reacting to the overcrowded Victorian housing in narrow streets, the new modern blocks promised life in heights, access to green space, and a sense of community.

Masterplans embraced new urban design ideas like the separation of traffic and pedestrian routes, the stand-alone slab blocks with long views, and the semi-public deck access – famously called the ‘streets in the sky’.

As most cities and towns in the UK entered the post-industrial era, urban regeneration at scale became an important part of the country’s economic strategy. A new class of people working in creative and financial sectors started to repopulate the inner parts of cities and towns, and waterfronts and former industrial districts became attractive places to live in and enjoy.

Leisure and commercial uses mixed with residential apartments became fundamental to comprehensive regeneration programmes. With new materials, new construction technology, and public sector support, the projects expanded in scale and aspiration. Large masterplans became then an important part of Broadway Malyan’s work.

In Britain, in the 2000s, Broadway Malyan won commissions such as St Mary’s Island Docks in Chatham, Kent to create a residential community from derelict docks; the Woolwich docks revamp in London; and a competition to design one of the country’s Millenium Villages, the Allerton Bywater for the English Partnerships, described as ‘the way forward for sustainable development that really breaks the mould’ (Building Design, 2001, pp 2).

Fast forward to the present and the future. We are facing an uncertain world to which urban design has to respond: The post-pandemic life has changed work and shopping habits; climate change adaptability and conserving nature are now priorities; and the creation of fair, inclusive and prosperous places where healthy communities can flourish matters more to us and our Clients.

Broadway Malyan continues to be at the forefront of the industry, innovating in urban design solutions that integrate nature into the built environment, creating biodiverse spaces and bringing ecological value to place-driven solutions.

Balancing lessons from the historic Ebenezer Howard’s English Garden Cities Movement with our innovative ideas, we are designing future Garden Communities such as Dunton Hills Garden Village in Essex. Here, we design in response to the existing landscape character and assets, and we create opportunities for well-being through wellness trails, cycle and pedestrian links and strategies to improve air quality and social interaction through car reduction.

This garden community of 4,000 homes and associated facilities is set to a stewardship model so the resident community will manage the landscape spaces in the future.

We are also reinventing perimeter blocks to create a mixed community in Norwich. We use the simple century-old concept of streets and squares to redevelop a large urban area around Anglia Square with a mix of new dwellings, retail and workspaces set in a greened and accessible public realm. In this design, we blend into the city’s old urban fabric, creating new connections and opening up new spaces with ecological and health benefits.

As always, balancing innovation and presentation continues to be the key to these designs and many others shown in this Together magazine across the global regions where we now work. Our success story, an impressive 65 years of evolving urban design through outstanding and award-winning projects, assures us to look optimistically towards the future. We are now creating the urban design history for the future, creating a new archive to inspire the next generations.