Homes on the edge of London win the Stirling Prize.

The 2026 RIBA Stirling Prize has gone to Lion Green Road, a housing scheme in Coulsdon, on the southern edge of London. Mary Duggan Architects designed it and RUFF Architects saw it through to completion, for Croydon council. The prize is thirty years old this year; it was first awarded in 1996.

The scheme holds 157 homes, private and affordable, among them homes for social rent, arranged in five thirteen-sided blocks. The site falls by some eight metres across a geological basin and sits beside a scheduled monument linked to the Surrey Iron Railway. The architects began with the landscape, and kept access open to the housing and to the open land behind it.

“delivers meaningful public benefit while offering high-quality amenity for residents”

The jury of six was made up of RIBA President Chris Williamson, Stephanie Macdonald of 6a architects, Tracy Meller of RSHP, Dr Julie Godefroy of CIBSE, Will Gompertz of Sir John Soane’s Museum and Catherine Winfield of Autodesk.

The other schemes on the shortlist were A house at Fairmead (Sergison Bates), Beam (Bennetts Associates), Paddington Square (Renzo Piano Building Workshop with Adamson Associates), Pembroke, Mill Lane (Haworth Tompkins) and River Wing, Clare College (Witherford Watson Mann Architects).