Men in Sheds
With a keen interest in modelmaking and hands-on craft, I enjoy creating architecture that works closely with local communities and responds to existing structures. I’m interested in how each design decision affects the experience and use of a space, especially from the perspective of those who inhabit it. My work focuses on adaptability and process, using physical making to explore construction, assembly, and material understanding across all scales.
This year, my project reimagines a derelict 19th-century electricity works in Crewe as a new central workshop for Men in Sheds, a charity that supports older men and women through making, craft, and community. The design responds to Crewe’s industrial heritage and its scattered sites of industrial ruin by creating a modular system of lightweight, low-cost “outposts”. These are fabricated and assembled at the main workshop space, then transported to sites of terrain vague around the town, turning pockets of neglect into places for making and intergenerational skill sharing.
The Men in Sheds workshop is designed as a sequence of making spaces, shifting from open, external areas to warm, enclosed rooms. This layout supports different types of craft while encouraging social interaction, reflecting the historic rail work and responding to site constraints and opportunities. Materials were chosen to celebrate ageing and use: oxidised timber, brass details, and an exposed outpost structure all reflect the project’s focus on repair, reuse and raw material beauty.
