On 25 March, Richard will be speaking at NLA’s Coffee Conversation about how London’s most constrained and overlooked sites can play a role in addressing both the housing crisis and the climate emergency. Across the city, small and fragmented plots are often dismissed as too difficult to develop. Backland sites, former garages and leftover spaces within established neighbourhoods are frequently overlooked by conventional development models. Yet collectively they represent a significant and largely untapped opportunity.

There is a particular responsibility that comes with working on an existing building. The Old Timberyard , a former Victorian workshop, offered the opportunity to demonstrate how careful retrofit can honour heritage whilst delivering genuine long-term performance. Behind its retained brickwork and historic fabric sits a carefully executed EnerPHit upgrade. This was not about surface improvements, but a rigorous, fabric-first transformation, reworking a cold, underperforming structure into a comfortable, resilient and low-energy building fit for contemporary use.