This Important Site: A Story of the Town of Crewe – Crewe Lives / Crewe Makes
This thesis project explores how architecture can reimagine the role of a town centre in a place that has been steadily forgotten. Crewe, once shaped by the optimism of the railway age, now lives in the shadow of its own legacy, its civic heart emptied out, its high street bypassed, its youth moving elsewhere. At the centre of this urban pause lies the former Royal Arcade site: cleared, fenced off, and suspended between past and promise.
The project doesn't aim to restore what was lost, but to propose something new, a future grounded in living, making, and belonging. At its core are two buildings: Crewe Lives, a residential development with shared spaces for community life; and Crewe Makes, a civic hub for creative work, collaboration, and education. These are not simply functions: they are architectures of agency, designed to retain people who might otherwise leave, and to attract new residents, especially younger people seeking an affordable alternative to the pressures of larger cities.
Bound together by a new green public square, the buildings stitch back together a broken urban fabric through walkable routes, active edges, and layered thresholds. But more than a design proposal, this is a project about rethinking the town centre as an everyday space, not one of grand statements, but of quiet purpose.
Through modular strategies, spatial clarity, and material honesty, the scheme reflects a belief that architecture’s role in regeneration is not to replace or replicate, but to invite life back in. In Crewe, that begins with giving people spaces they can call their own again.
