The William Sutton Prize has unveiled its 2025 shortlist, marking the sixth edition of the prestigious awards program with an expanded £125,000 prize fund to commemorate Clarion Housing Group's 125th anniversary. The competition features two distinct categories designed to address critical challenges in sustainable housing and community development across the United Kingdom.
The program includes the William Sutton Prize for Sustainability, which focuses on promoting restoration and preservation of the natural world, and the William Sutton Prize for Connected Communities, aimed at enhancing community ties, promoting inclusion, and strengthening the social fabric of Clarion neighborhoods. The substantial prize pool will be divided between winners of each category, with recipients also receiving tailored business support packages and opportunities to collaborate with Clarion, its partners, and industry experts to transform innovative ideas into reality.
Clarion Housing Group Chief Executive Clare Miller emphasized the importance of innovation in driving progress. "Innovation is the engine that drives progress in sustainability and in building stronger, more connected communities," Miller stated. "At Clarion, we believe that empowering people to turn bold ideas into reality is essential for building a better future, and that's why we created The William Sutton Prize. The William Sutton Prize not only unlocks funding; it unlocks potential. It's about backing the thinkers, the doers and the dreamers who are shaping homes, places, and lives for generations to come."
The sustainability category features six groundbreaking finalists addressing various environmental challenges. AdaptiveHeat by Eyesea Green tackles the urgent challenge of decarbonizing heating in heritage and hard-to-retrofit homes through a combination of low-temperature air-source heat pumps, infrared ceiling panels, and an AI-powered control platform called Eyesense. This innovative system can reduce energy use by over 40 percent while enhancing comfort through precise, resident-responsive heating that targets only occupied spaces in real time.
BeeBlox by NoMAD addresses both pollinator decline and concrete's environmental impact by replacing solid concrete retaining walls with modular green 3D-printed walls made from 96 percent local waste materials. Each hexagonal unit supports native wild bees by providing tailored soil, shelter, and seasonal forage, co-designed with experts from Kew Gardens. The solution offers housing associations a way to meet biodiversity net gain targets while creating climate-resilient infrastructure.
Material Cultures presents Home Schooling, a forward-thinking development model that transforms housing construction sites into live learning environments teaching biobased building skills while supporting local material supply chains and restoring biodiversity. This approach tackles the housing crisis, green skills gap, and environmental impact of conventional development simultaneously through small-scale housing projects built with local, low-carbon materials and delivered through community land trusts.
Agricycle Innovation's ReHarvest Board converts agricultural waste including spent mushroom substrate, fruit pulp, and vegetable residues into low-carbon, high-performance insulation and wall panels. Manufactured using low-energy, non-toxic methods, each lightweight panel is fire and water-resistant and can reduce embodied carbon by up to 80 percent compared with traditional plasterboard and insulation, addressing the UK's annual generation of over one million tons of agricultural waste.
Bioregional's Retrofit Automation Tool addresses the need for faster, more reliable retrofit planning across housing portfolios using empirical data rather than theoretical models. The tool can process complex datasets, integrate them with geographic property data and smart meter readings, and generate decarbonization pathways based on real-world performance, compressing six to twelve months of manual analysis into clear, actionable strategies.
WeCanMake's Re-Use House tackles climate and housing crises by transforming overlooked urban spaces into new homes using reclaimed building materials. The model identifies small infill plots like garage sites and combines them with reclaimed materials from nearby end-of-life buildings, processed in local neighborhood factories to build high-quality, co-designed homes for social rent. In south Bristol alone, this approach could deliver up to 5,620 new affordable homes across 853 public land sites.
The Connected Communities category showcases five innovative approaches to strengthening social bonds and community engagement. Steel Warriors' Betts Park Outdoor Gym project revitalizes underused public spaces by co-creating outdoor gyms built from knives removed from the streets, working with local residents, councils, and social housing communities to replace broken infrastructure with striking, high-quality spaces for exercise, training, and events.
GoodGym's Building Connected Communities initiative tackles loneliness, poor mental health, and rising safety concerns among older social housing residents through a volunteer program where local volunteers run, walk, or cycle to visit residents for friendly chats or complete practical tasks like changing lightbulbs, moving furniture, and clearing gardens. The program aims to train 200 new volunteers and deliver 2,000 visits and missions.
NeighbourlyLab and Neya present the Neya AI Super-Neighbour, a digital platform designed to spark connection, sharing, and mutual support within local communities through a friendly, AI-powered messaging system that introduces neighbors, answers everyday questions, and encourages positive interactions like borrowing tools, finding walking partners, or sharing surplus food.
Wastesmiths CIC's Populated Planters reimagines how shared spaces in social housing are shaped by turning planter installations into hands-on community experiences where residents co-design and build bespoke planters using recycled materials they've collected themselves through outdoor workshops using mobile, low-energy machinery.
Motivez's Sustainable London empowers under-represented young people aged 14-16 from social housing to become environmental innovators and future STEM leaders through a year-long development program including workshops, mentoring, industry site visits, and a STEM-based hackathon where participants design solutions to local and global environmental challenges.
The awards program honors William Sutton, Clarion Housing Group's founder and a Victorian entrepreneur who bequeathed his fortune to providing public housing. Today, Clarion stands as the largest housing association in the UK, managing 125,000 homes across 170 local authorities. Previous winners include Bell Phillips Architects, which won in 2023 with "A Home-Grown Solution to Delivering Net Zero," Mole Architects with a zero-carbon community homebuilding system in 2022, and Surman Weston's Hackney School of Food in an earlier competition.
This year's distinguished judging panel includes Peter Murray OBE, co-founder of New London Architecture, Tara Gbolade, co-founding director of Gbolade Design Studio, Matt Harvey-Agyemang, co-founder of POoR Collective, and Greg Fitzgerald, chief executive of Vistry Group. The judges will evaluate entries based on their potential for real-world impact, scalability, and alignment with the prize's mission to drive innovation in sustainable housing and community development.
