Submission by Purcell.
Being a good ancestor
Practice
1. Do you have a clearly stated purpose aligned with the planetary emergency? We’re looking for a bold ambition here, and a culture which recognises the need for long-term thinking.
Our practice was founded 75 years ago on an instinct to save heritage buildings before they were lost in the post-war rush to rebuild Britain. Today we represent a collective of heritage and conservation specialists seeking to safeguard our inherited world for future generations. We see ourselves as creative stewards, caring for and maintaining our built heritage, sensitively adapting it to meet the needs of today whilst planning for a more resilient tomorrow. Last year we celebrated becoming B Corp certified, and our first B Impact report was published in March this year reaffirming our commitment to being a practice that drives our business as a force for good. Aligned with this, we updated our stated mission: “Together we reimagine heritage in new ways, sustainably designing places where people can belong”.
2. Do you have a clearly stated purpose aligned with the planetary emergency? We’re looking for a bold ambition here, and a culture which recognises the need for long-term thinking.
We are a proud Employee-Owned Trust, committed to passing on ownership while protecting the values and legacy of those who established the practice. Employee ownership shapes how we listen, invest and make decisions, bringing strategic, financial and engagement benefits across the practice. Our governance is led by a board of trustees made up of staff from each region, alongside our main board and employee council. In 2025, we refreshed how these groups work together, creating a stronger platform for innovation, leadership, growth and personal development. The employee council is central to this structure, reinforcing our shared responsibility as owners. It gives everyone a voice, acts as a trusted sounding board on issues affecting the practice, and helps shape policies and procedures through regular dialogue with the board. This structure helps safeguard our values while supporting long-term stewardship and continuity.
3. Do you share research and knowledge for the benefit of society and the wider world?
We have an active Research & Development fund which is used for original research into areas that will broaden and add to the debate around the environmental and social impacts of conservation and heritage. In 2025 we launched our Nothing New campaign. This brought together leading voices from across the built environment sector to share insights on how centuries-old stewardship principles can inform the transition to a circular economy. It is the latest step in Purcell’s mission to drive discussion and systemic change across the construction industry. The resulting publication distils these discussions into ten actionable recommendations for government and industry. It highlights how the heritage sector’s wealth of transferable knowledge – rooted in reuse, repair and long-term care – offers a practical framework for scaling up a circular economy in the built environment.
Project
1. Do you advocate for long-term thinking at the outset of work? Do you initiate work with long-term thinking and challenge clients? Also, can the organisation demonstrate that this approach has worked?
More than 95% of our work involves existing buildings, many of them centuries old, so long-term thinking is fundamental to how we practise. We approach every commission as one chapter in a much longer story, balancing heritage significance, building performance and future adaptability so that places can continue to evolve. This mindset shapes our work on nationally significant sites such as the British Museum, Manchester Town Hall, Auckland Castle and Winchester Cathedral, where stewardship, repair and careful adaptation must support both present needs and future resilience. Our multi-disciplinary teams of architects, heritage consultants, surveyors and sustainability specialists work together to test options early, challenge short-term decisions and design for longevity. That often means prioritising repair over replacement, embedding reversible interventions where possible, and considering how buildings will evolve over decades rather than just at practical completion.
2. Does your work take account of the future climate and the need for resilience?
Our work increasingly addresses the impacts of climate change on existing buildings, with responses tailored to the significance, condition and performance of each site. These range from the wholesale replacement of glazing at the Grade II* listed Smithson School to reduce overheating and heat loss, to more discreet interventions at Salford Cathedral, where roof renewal works include wider gutters and additional downpipes to improve resilience to more intense storm events. To support this work, we have developed a climate hazard risk assessment template specifically for heritage buildings, helping clients identify vulnerabilities early and embed long-term resilience within planned maintenance and capital programmes. By extending the life of existing buildings, championing adaptability and repair, and promoting local skills and materials, we reduce reliance on virgin resources and fragile supply chains while creating a more resilient built environment.
3. Does the majority of your work go beyond mitigating negatives and towards optimising positives?
Our work has always sought to balance harm with positive outcomes. In heritage conservation, this has traditionally meant weighing ‘harm’ to the heritage asset against public benefit. Increasingly, we extend that thinking to include environmental harm and the wider benefits of regenerative design and climate action. While we cannot claim that the majority of our work is fully regenerative, we are actively pushing projects in that direction. In 2025, this included Salford Cathedral, where low-carbon technologies such as open-loop ground source heat pumps and underfloor heating were paired with sensitive fabric upgrades, including secondary glazing to protect the stained glass. At the Shoemakers Museum in Somerset, biobased materials were used as the primary structural elements. At the National Gallery, the Sainsbury Wing was reimagined to improve access, while discarded materials were given a new life and donated through Globechain to community groups and local charities.
Co-evolving with nature
Practice
1. Do you use biophilia within your premises and/or do you regularly gather in natural settings?
We regularly host our annual Practice Day Out within the setting of a registered park or garden. For the last two years we have been hosted at Nevill Holt Hall, where people can participate in an afternoon sketching session, or tour of the kitchen garden. Previous years have been at Stowe, and this year we will be in Regent’s Park. This is driven by desire to bring everyone together in a heritage landscape.
2. Can you share examples of where you have considered nature in decision making?
Two years ago, we submitted a proposal to put nature on our Board of Trustees. We submitted a formal application on behalf of nature to a recent call for new trustee members. The existing Trustees felt it was not the right time to formally have nature on the Board of Trustees, but recognised the need for this clearly to be taken into decision making. As a result, we sent Board members on the UKGBC Recalibrate Programme aimed at advocating better decision making at board level. Whilst we weren’t able to send anyone as part of this year’s cohort, we do plan to continue this in future years.
3. Are you supporting nature locally and nationally?
We could certainly do more!
Project
1. Can you demonstrate work that strives to match the performance of a mature ecosystem?
Our greatest challenge here is that we are working with existing buildings which are heavily constrained. In these instances, we seek out opportunities to enhance biodiversity, without risking the historic fabric. One recent example involves the work of our Heritage Consultancy Team, working alongside HTA landscape architects. ‘Connected Canterbury’ forms part of Canterbury City Council’s Levelling Up Funding, which was granted in January 2023. The project involves improvements to 17 public gardens, squares and arrival points across the city, focusing on restoring degraded heritage assets, transforming public realm, and enhancing connectivity and interpretation, whilst bringing nature into the heart of the city.
2. Are you working on material stewardship?
The majority of our projects involve the conservation of historic buildings. We regularly default to using natural materials, like stone and timber, using materials that are vernacular to the area, and often sourced locally. We are now regularly supporting clients with pre-refurbishment audits which form part of a reuse-first strategy, helping identify and unlock the value in the materials they already have. We created an internal Little Book of Materials, designed specifically to help teams get a good understanding of materials by comparing them on a ‘sliding scale of bad’. We also have built up our inhouse capabilities to assess risks to existing materials with the increased uptake of fabric improvement measures. Typically, this involves considering the risk of condensation and moisture build up in retrofit projects. This risk-led approach helps prolong the life of the existing materials.
3. Does the majority of your work demonstrate the use of biologically-inspired approaches such as Bioregionalism, Biophilia or Biomimicry?
Some of our projects have started to introduce clear biophilic strategies within the early design stages. This has been borne out of a greater adoption of WELL certification by some of our clients.
Creating a just space for people
Practice
1. Do you have a progressive EDI policy and can you evidence many forms of diversity, which are welcomed and acknowledged, within your company/organisation?
In 2025, we accelerated our JEDI agenda, strengthening our equitable opportunity, transparency and inclusive culture. Women make up 55% of our workforce, reflecting progress in building a more balanced and representative business. We overhauled our family leave offer to better reflect lived experience, expanding support for fertility, miscarriage, bereavement, menopause, neonatal care, adoption and foster carers, and introduced a childcare loan scheme to ease the transition back from leave. Together, these measures help address structural barriers, including our gender pay gap. We also introduced salary transparency and refreshed our website and vacancy language to attract a broader and more diverse applicant pool. Our equal opportunities monitoring was expanded to include socio-economic background, giving us deeper insight into representation and access. In 2025, we achieved 63% in our TIDE assessment and committed to annual review and accountability. We delivered strategic JEDI training to the board, with wider rollout planned for 2026.
2. Do you operate a no overtime culture, meet the living wage consistently, and stipulate a fair salary ratio between staff of all levels?
We are committed to a healthy and sustainable working environment where wellbeing is central to success. Recognising the pressures of the construction industry, we take a proactive approach to support our people. We use CMap to record hours and monitor excess time, helping ensure employees are not overloaded or overworking. Our culture promotes flexibility, supported by policies for different life stages, including sabbaticals. Leaders undertake self-awareness training to understand their impact on team wellbeing, while teams receive resilience training to better manage challenge and change. Support is further strengthened through our employee assistance programme, access to GPs and occupational health, and our regional network of trained mental health first aiders, known as Purcell Pals, who provide peer support and signposting. We are a Living Wage Employer, and stipulate equal pay between staff of all levels. We are actively working to reduce our gender pay gap which is significantly below average.
3. Do you support charities, community groups, social enterprises, action groups and others through pro-bono work, charitable giving or in-kind donations?
In 2025, we delivered 376 days of social value, including mentoring, career advice and work placements to 22 young people and 1069 hours delivering careers training. We donated £12,870 to charitable causes and sent a consignment of laptops to the Baraka Community Partnership in Zambia. Members of our Manchester team used our volunteer day policy to aid vital work on site to preserve a hidden glass mosaic in a former convent school. We donated in-kind expertise by Purcell staff to heritage groups like the Cathedral Fabric Commission for England, Enfield Society Heritage and Conservation Group, and the Diocese of Chelmsford Advisory Committee, as well as working with climate action groups like Architects Declare supporting their Circular Revolution.
4. Do you use an ethical framework to assess opportunities and/or supply chain partners and is them team consulted on these decisions?
No. Though there has definitely been a shift in recent years, with an increasing focus on our red lines and how we balance competing perspectives. This is often linked to a question of reputational risk. However, we have never publicly refused to work with certain clients, suppliers or organisations on ethical grounds.
Project
1. Does your work demonstrate deep engagement with local stakeholders and end users?
Providing sustainable legacies means meeting the objectives of those who will use buildings after we hand them over and we are increasingly discovering correlations between meaningful participation and successful legacies. For participation to be meaningful – culminating in ‘co-design/production’ – we give contributors significant buy-in and shared ownership of the proposal. Our role is often to tease out what’s important to communities; finding gems of insight to spark innovation and provide end-products that speak to their identity. This is typically achieved through engagement workshops and design charrettes. At Bristol’s Creative Youth Network, we have been engaging with young people for several years in the delivery of the now transformed Bridewell Magistrates’ Court. After years of dereliction, Purcell worked with the CYN to create an accessible and sustainable youth enterprise centre which supports young people from diverse backgrounds in launching their own creative businesses and exploring new opportunities.
2. Does your work create connected and resilient communities which positively contribute to neighbourhoods and allow equality of access?
We know the greatest impact we have is through the projects we are involved in. We corroboratively apply our expertise and contextual understanding of the continuing history of places to deliver a sustainable legacy for every building we work on. This means reaching beyond the boundaries of the site to serve the surrounding communities and our broader supply chain. For example, our transformation of the Grade I listed Manchester Town Hall, one of the largest conservation projects currently being undertaken, will see the integration of 8 new lifts to provide access for all throughout the building. To date, Purcell have delivered £385,395 of social value specifically on this project, including providing apprenticeships, promoting training and skills, and volunteer hours.
3. Does the majority of your work promote equity in society, and consider all people, not only building inhabitants
Purcell does not have legal obligations under the Modern Slavery Act 2015. However, we are committed to ensuring our business practices are of exemplary standards both practically and ethically, and we have embedded and long-standing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) principles. As such, Purcell voluntarily operates this policy and a Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking Statement, outlining our commitment to preventing slavery, human trafficking and forced and child labour in any part of our own business and our supply chain. As signatories to the RIBA Inclusion Charter, we are part of a new community of equity champions and role models with a shared purpose to driving change through equality and new opportunities. RIBA have, in the past, accredited the Purcell Conservation School, a residential programme founded in 2016 and focused on transferring the knowledge of traditional and acute conservation techniques that are crucial facets of the heritage-driven services Purcell specialises in.