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Who Tim Pitman and Luke Tozer; plus five staff
What Architects
Where Royal Oak, London
When Founded 2002

The Gap House, with a frontage just 2.4m wide

Pitman Tozer Architects has just celebrated the completion of its largest project to date, a sevenstorey block on a noisy site next to a curved railway line in Bethnal Green for London social-housing provider Peabody. For a practice comfortably used to doing high-end renovations and housing extensions in west London, the project was something of a game changer. It provides 67 new homes for affordable rent, shared ownership and private sale as well as a new pedestrian street between Bethnal Green main line and Underground stations. Luke Tozer, who with Tim Pitman is one of the founding directors, describes the project as a 'small acorn', which grew from a modest feasibility study for another site in London for Peabody four years ago to its greatest achievement yet.

Pitman and Tozer met while studying architecture at the University of Cambridge and subsequently the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow, before setting up the practice in 2002. It first garnered national attention when it won the prestigious RIBA Manser Medal for its Gap House, built for Tozer and his family, in 2009. Says Tozer, 'Winning the medal helped put us on the radar. It helped give an independent stamp of approval, rather than us just saying we can do it.'

With a frontage that's just 2.4m wide, Gap House is ingeniously slotted into an uncompromising plot to create a four-storey family home in Bayswater, London that expands into what was once part of the neighbour's back garden. 'There was a lot of objection locally to it at the time, and most of it was to do with the idea of putting a contemporary building between two listed buildings in a conservation area,' comments Tozer. A few years later, Lateral House, completed in 2012, transformed a shabby Victorian terraced house into a spacious five-bedroom family home with a new roof terrace and timber-clad annex in the garden.

While the practice doesn't wish to be pigeonholed and would love to venture outside the world of housing, possibly even with a chapel, it is currently on site with a project for Guinness Housing and a number of renovations of existing houses and extensions in west London, including four on the same street.

Tim Pitman and Luke Tozer (L-R)

Looking down the line, the future looks bright. Last year, while Pitman Tozer Architects was finishing the housing project for Peabody in Bethnal Green, it was chosen among six other practices for Peabody's Small Projects Panel, following a tendering process that attracted more than 300 entries. In contrast to other architecture competitions, there was no requirement for entrants to declare turnover, they were simply asked to come up with a design for one of three sites chosen by Peabody. The initiative, praised by former RIBA president Angela Brady, who was campaigning to make it easier for smaller practices to enter competitions, will allow the six architects to bid for Peabody's smaller schemes featuring 20 homes and fewer.

But, having just completed a project with 67 homes, the practice has its sights set even higher. 'We are also bidding to get on its large-project framework, and ideally we see that forming more and more of the workload of the practice over the next four or five years,' says Tozer. CSH