Image © BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, London
Announcing Coming of Age 2025: C20’s end of year ‘honours list’ celebrating the best of British architecture that’s turned 30 years old and so become eligible for national listing consideration.
Turning the clock back to those buildings completed in 1995, we enter the optimistic mid-90s era of urban regeneration, with five flagship projects – cultural, residential, and infrastructure related – all on prominent waterfront sites in Cardiff, Lambeth, Salford, Southampton and Stockton, and billed as catalysts for the post-industrial regeneration it was hoped would follow. The score-card may be mixed on their economic legacy, but the quality of the buildings and structures that remain is beyond question.
Two bridges make the list: the only Santiago Calatrava project in the UK to date, a slender needle of modernity in Manchester that set the template for countless bridges in the decades followed; and a playful late-PoMo tidal barrage on Teesside. Three remarkable residential projects also make the list: experimental early schemes from eco-pioneer Bill Dunster and then Young Architect of the Year, later Stirling Prize winner, Níall McLaughlin, plus an exemplary affordable housing scheme on London’s Southbank.
The 1990s turn to slightly more traditional, historically resonant styles of architecture is also evident in an Arts & Crafts style Catholic church in Belfast and a colonnade auditorium building for a Cambridge college by Hopkins. Meanwhile, the Hindu Mandir (temple) that tops our 2025 list is a genuinely extraordinary one-off; a building unlike any other in modern Britain, that has more in common with a 1,000-year-old cathedral or priory than anything else seen in the 20th century. Placing Vastu Shastra’s ‘sacred architecture’ squarely in suburbia, it’s a dazzling part of our national story.
We hope the next stop for these outstanding buildings will be richly deserved recognition and a place on the National Heritage List.
Image © Nick Higham
Standing the test of time
The selection criteria for listing buildings are set by the government Department for Culture, Media and Sport, with Historic England providing detailed guidance and carrying our research on each specific case. Along with the primary considerations of ‘special architectural and historic interest’, the principles state that buildings under 30 years of age are not usually considered eligible because ‘they have yet to stand the test of time.’ However, when a building reaches this key age threshold, there’s currently no mechanism to proactively review or assess its heritage value, until it comes under threat of demolition or harmful alteration. (NB. In exceptional circumstances, buildings may be listed when they are under 30, but only if they are both of exceptional quality and at risk of demolition).
C20 Society’s annual ‘Coming of Age’ initiative addresses this directly, by identifying 10 outstanding buildings across the country that opened in 1995, and recommending they be added to the National Heritage List. This hit-parade of heritage from the recent past celebrates the richness and diversity in our built environment, set within the social, political and cultural contexts of the day.
Given that around 30 years after construction is often the point at which buildings (however well-constructed in the first place) are likely to require their first major refurbishment, any listing designation at this point would provide a timely opportunity to ensure that such works recognise and respond to what makes a building significant. Encouraging retrofit with the long-term, sustainable future as a key objective.
Approaching 30 years old is also often the moment in a building’s lifespan when it is most likely to be at the nadir of its popularity and fashionability, and therefore potentially at its most vulnerable. Why wait until the bulldozers are poised, to intervene and try to protect an outstanding building, when it is possible to make an objective judgement far earlier?
Acknowledgements
A special thanks to Joseph Strang – MSt student in Building History at Cambridge and former Visiting Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute – for co-researching this years list and authoring the individual entries.
BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir (Neasden Temple) Chandrakant Sompura Neasden, London 1995 BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, commonly known as Neasden Temple, was the first traditional Hindu temple built in Europe and for many years, the largest buil...
Trinity Footbridge Manchester Calatrava 1995 Trinity Footbridge It was bridges that first carried Santiago Calatrava to global prominence, and he has since gone on to design every imaginable civic form: museums, universities, stations and ai...
Harbour Lights Cinema Southampton Burrell Foley Fischer 1995 In 1984, P&O pulled its cross-channel ferries out of Southampton, transferring the business along the south coast to the ports at Dover and Portsmouth. By 1995, despite remainin...
Hope House Molesey, London Bill & Sue Dunster (ZEDfactory) 1995 Bill Dunster is famous for his career-long quest to achieve environmental sustainability; as a student in the 80s he designed a housing estate run on solar power and, later, hi...
Broadwall Housing Development Lambeth, London Lifschutz, Davidson, Sandilands 1995 By the mid-1990s, the South bank of the Thames had become an extreme study in imbalance. Major employers such as Shell and IBM brought more than 50,000 workers...
Queen's Building Emmanuel College, Cambridge Hopkins Architects 1995 Close observers of the Coming-of-Age List will note a similarity between Emmanuel College’s Queen’s Building and the 2024 list’s Glyndebourne Opera House, a free-standin...
Tees Barrage Stockton-on-Tees Napper Architects 1995 In the late 1980s the tidal waters of the Tees, banked by derelict engineering works and other hallmarks of Thatcher’s economic ‘Wilderness’, routinely revealed silty mudflats; home to ...
St Brigid’s Church Belfast Kennedy FitzGerald Architects 1995 According to the Banishment Act of 1697, all ordinaries and regular clergy of the Catholic Church were obliged to leave Ireland within a year. In defiance of this law, an intrepid ...
Photographer’s Hide Níall McLaughlin Foxall, Northamptonshire 1995 Upon winning the inaugural BD Young Architect of the Year award in 1998, Niall McLaughlin stated of his work that “the history of the site is the starting point for archite...
Techniquest ABK Architects Cardiff 1995 As the 20th century entered its adolescence, Cardiff’s docks stood at the heart of the world’s coal trade, outstripping the tonnage handled at rival docks in London and Liverpool. Mine owners and ship...
Architect: Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners (now Grimshaw) The opening of the Channel Tunnel in November 1994 was the culmination of surely the 20th century’s biggest single civil engineering and political project. Physically connecting Britain an...
Architect: Future Systems This wedge-shaped private house, squeezed into a 20ft gap between a 1860s pub and a late-Georgian terrace, was one of the first built-projects by Future Systems - a unique practice whose output embodied the optimism and f...
Architect: Populous As soccer fever gripped the USA at the FIFA World Cup ‘94, closer to home Huddersfield Town FC’s elegant yet groundbreaking new Kirklees Stadium (by Populous) scooped the RIBA Building of the Year Award – the only stadium...
Architect: Philip England The tallest and steepest roller coaster in the world at the time of its opening, the Pepsi Max (now known as The Big One) joined the several other architecturally notable structures at Blackpool Pleasure Beach - Joseph Em...
Architects: Hopkins Architects A beautiful essay in fitting comfortably into a sensitive historical landscape without pastiche or pomposity, Hopkins seized this rare opportunity to build a large-scale purpose-designed theatre in the countryside, a...
Architect: Hudson Architects A six bedroom family home, Baggy House is a building of contrasts, and a remarkable synthesis of modernist and vernacular elements. Situated on one of the most unspoilt stretches of Britain’s coastline, it mediates b...
Architect: Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners (now Grimshaw) The RAC Regional Control Centre transformed an otherwise nondescript road-locked site near a major junction into a monumental statement: An energy efficient, technologically advanced headqu...
Architect: Niall Philips Niall Philips dabbled in this thoughtful piece of early eco-modernism on the woody Welsh Wildlife Centre in Cilgerran, which scooped The Royal Society of Architects in Wales Building of the Year. The south facing elevation...
Architect: Edward Cullinan Architects (now Cullinan Studio) Ted Cullinan (now Cullinan Studio) conjured a techno take on Jacobethan at his St College Cambridge library, radically reconstructing and extending an existing Tudor Gothic style Victoria...
Architect: Dixon Jones This is student accommodation, but not as we know it. In the postmodern Garthadee project, part of Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University, Jeremy Dixon and Ed Jones managed to channel both Aldo Rossi and Scottish baronial arc...
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