Congratulations Allford Hall Monaghan Morris
The shortlisting of The Sheds for the 2026 RIBA South West Awards feels earned rather than ornamental. This is not a cosmetic reuse of industrial fabric. It is a precise and intelligent act of recalibration.
Set within Bristol’s Temple Quarter, the project forms the first completed element of the wider campus ambition: a regeneration strategy that seeks to convert post-industrial residue into civic and intellectual infrastructure. The two Victorian gas sheds were not treated as inconsequential relics. They were treated as load-bearing memory. Their scale, their rhythm, their unapologetic industrial presence respected and honoured.
Inside, the technical demands were exacting. High-performance research environments do not easily coexist with nineteenth-century workshop. The solution is rigorous: a timber box-in-box insertion, structurally and acoustically isolated, holding specialist laboratories within a controlled inner architecture. It is a measured tectonic dialogue between old steel and new timber. Between permanence and adaptability. Between civic ambition and scientific precision.
This is what serious adaptive reuse looks like. It understands that heritage is not a fragile artefact. It is a framework for contemporary invention.
Assembly Bristol occupies a long-vacant edge condition between the inner circuit road and William Jessop’s Floating Harbour. Confidently acknowledging that adjacency, it works with it; confident, definite, purposeful.
The campus is organised around a waterfront park, a deliberate civic gesture that reconnects the harbour edge to the restored historic street of Cheese Lane. A hierarchy of three buildings establishes enclosure and release, framing a vista from Pip and Jay Church to the water. The urban choreography is clear. This is not speculative massing, this is spatial thinking, a community of form and function.
Each building carries a distinct character, yet the campus reads as a coherent whole. Exposed structures reduce embodied carbon and allow the mechanics of the buildings to be understood rather than concealed. There is an honesty to the material strategy. Structure is not decorative. It is present, legible, celebrated.
In both projects, sustainability is not appended as rhetoric. It is embedded in the tectonics, in the construction logic, in the discipline of material use.
The RIBA South West shortlist signals something important. Bristol is not simply building. It is recalibrating. This is turning industrial inheritance into civic and intellectual capital. Walk the harbour edge, step inside the sheds, test the spatial logic against lived experience, experience a shift in the spirit of the city.
If architecture is to stand the test of time, it must negotiate memory, performance and public life simultaneously. These two projects understand that with clarity and purpose.
