Foundations of the Future with City Lions

As architects, it’s easy to get caught up in the detail—deadlines, coordination, clash detection, cost plans. Working on a live site like Station Street in Portsmouth, I’ve been deep in the day-to-day of delivery. But earlier this year, mentoring a group of students through City Lions offered a rare and refreshing chance to zoom out.

City Lions, run by Westminster City Council, connects young people with creative professionals across London and beyond. For this session, we invited students to design a pavilion that could accommodate two contrasting programmes—loud and quiet. Seeing the brief through their eyes reminded me of what’s really at stake in our work. The students weren’t bound by technical constraints or delivery pressures. What they brought instead was imagination, curiosity, and a completely different way of seeing. Their questions weren’t shaped by process—they were rooted in people, place, and possibility. In a profession that can often feel all-consuming, mentoring offered a moment to reconnect with why I chose this path in the first place: to design with purpose, to listen more deeply, and to help shape environments that reflect more voices—not fewer.