20x20 Farrell Centre

Sir Terry Farrell is one of the UK’s leading architect-planners. During fifty years in practice he has completed many award-winning buildings and masterplans, including the MI6 Building, Alban Gate, Embankment Place and The Home Office Headquarters in London as well as millennium projects, such as The Deep in Hull, and UK masterplans including those for Greenwich Peninsula and Paddington Basin. Notable projects in East Asia include Incheon airport in Seoul, Beijing Station and Guangzhou Station in China (the largest in the world), and the Peak Tower and Kowloon Station development, both in Hong Kong.

Farrell has longstanding connections to Newcastle. He grew up in the city and studied at Newcastle University (1956–61). He produced the masterplan for regenerating the quayside in the early 1990s, and has since undertaken several major projects in the city, including the Centre for Life (2000), the Newcastle University campus masterplan (2004) and the extension to the Great North Museum (2009).

In 2018, Farrell generously donated his practice archive to Newcastle University as a resource for research and public engagement. At the same time, he agreed to give £1 million towards the creation of the Farrell Centre as an ‘urban room’ focused on Tyneside which would also contribute to broader national and international debates around architecture and cities and the future of how we live. Sir Terry Farrell stepped back from the practice he founded in 1965 – known today as Farrells – in 2019.

Before setting up Ash Sakula in 1994, Cany Ash worked for the GLC Architect’s Department and Burrell Foley Fischer, as well as in New York and Berlin. She has taught at a number of architectural schools as a critic and studio tutor and is an external examiner at Cambridge University. She is an experienced co-designer, leading design workshops with young people and many community groups. She has served on the RIBA Awards Group, as a CABE Enabler, a Client Design Advisor and a Civic Trust Awards Assessor. She is member of the South East Design Review Panel.

Mat Barnes is director of CAN – and architecture and art studio which designs characterful buildings, places, objects and spaces that subvert and amplify their social and cultural contexts and respond to their physical bounds. CAN create idiosyncratic and striking projects, underwritten by cultural and historical research, and believe that architecture can and should make the city a more joyful, inclusive and exciting place to live and work.

Prior to founding CAN, Mat was an Associate at Studio 54 Architecture where he was responsible for the award-winning Peabody infill housing projects delivered through the Small Projects Panel. He also delivered the complex Arlington Road housing scheme in Camden. He is a former member of STORE, a teaching and arts collective and has delivered lectures on CAN's work across Europe. He has been a guest critic at a number of universities including UCL and Westminster. He consolidated his various creative practices to form CAN in 2016.

Pooja Agrawal is an architect and planner who is currently CEO of Public Practice. She previously worked as a public servant at Homes England and the Greater London Authority, where as part of the Regeneration and Economic Development Team she helped co-found Public Practice in 2017.

Prior to this, she worked at private architecture and urban design practices including Publica, We Made That and G-Tects (New York) and taught at Central Saint Martins and was a Trustee for the Museum of Architecture.

Alongside Public Practice Pooja co-hosts spatial equality platform Sound Advice and co-published Now You Know, a compendium of fifty essays exploring spatial and racial inequality. In 2018 and 2019 she was nominated for the Planner’s Woman of Influence.

Jayden Ali is founder of JA Projects – a London based practice working at the intersection of architecture, urban strategy, art and performance.

"We work", the practice writes, "in culturally rich spaces, on projects we love, in places and contexts we care about.

"Our approach to architecture and city-making mirrors our social values – places should be diverse, supportive and enriching.

"Our work strikes a balance between playfulness and precision, and is driven by a design ethos grounded in observation, participation and collaborative design.

"Our ultimate goal is to weave beautiful stories and deliver exciting projects that speak to and for the people they serve.

"From ground-breaking exhibitions, through low-carbon buildings, to pioneering urban strategy, our projects intervene both socially and spatially to deliver a more sustainable and more equitable world."

Jayden teaches at Central St Martings where he is Unit Leader as well as a Course Tutor on both M ARCH Architecture and MA Cities. He previously taught the Global Free Unit, alongside professor Robert Mull at the University of Brighton, a diploma unit that assists students in making independent projects based upon their personal interest, histories and beliefs.

Jayden graduated from the The Cass with a previous degree from the University of East London.

Anne Thorne founded Anne Thorne Architects Partnership in 1991. Prior to that she was a founder member of Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative 1980.

Her work includes co-housing, the design of affordable passive housing and the conversion of existing houses to low energy standards and primary schools in Brixton and Essex including for children with special needs. Her work has always considered energy efficiency – excluding pollutants using natural and re-cycled materials.

Collaboration is key to her practice. He work with artists on the re-design of the subway network at Aldgate included extensive community surveys, working with traffic engineers to enable planting trees in place of the subways. She was Master of the Art Workers Guild in 2019.

Frances Bradshaw has been a partner at Anne Thorne Architects since 1995. She has focussed on how women’s lives shape and are shaped by buildings and the city, on participatory design, on regeneration and community projects, and on low energy and ecological building design including building to the the passivhaus standard.

She has contributed through practice based research, lectures, articles and seminars to developing and forwarding sustainable design and construction, and has been Trustee of the Association for Environment Conscious Building since 2012.

Fran studied architecture and trained as a bricklayer. In 1980 she was a founder member of Matrix, the feminist design collective, and is a joint author of ‘Making Space - Women and the man made environment’ (1984, reprinted 2022)