One of the things we've thought about this year is what it takes to be part of the place you live and work in, rather than just operating in it.
It's a question we ask on every project. Does a building bring people together, or does it only occupy ground? This year we decided to ask it of the studio as well.
We looked at a few options. Sign boards along the main street were the obvious choice: cheap reach, easy to organise, done by lunchtime. It didn't feel right. Visibility isn't the same as being part of somewhere, and we wanted our first proper step to be the second thing.
So we ended up at Morley Cricket Club, five minutes from our door on Scatcherd Lane.
A personal route in
The connection came through Andrew, one of our directors, whose daughter plays and trains with the club's junior section. That gave us a real way in: not a business looking for a community to attach itself to, but people already invested in a club that matters to their own family.
This year we sponsored the club's beer festival, put a board up on the pitch and a sign on the benches by the clubhouse. Small things on their own. They're a start rather than a gesture, and we intend to build on them. We also played the club's charity golf day in August, with mixed results.
The beer
We also got a beer named after us at the festival. No Harsh Shadows, which needs a little explaining.
It comes from our Roundhay project, the one featured in The Times. When the client set the brief, she was specific about light: she didn't want the hard, striped shadows a badly placed rooflight throws across a room at midday. Everything followed from that. Where the glazing went, how the roof was pitched, where the rooflights sat and how they were sized. She said it back to the journalist as one of the things she'd asked for and got, and the phrase stuck with us.
So it ended up on a pump clip at a cricket club beer festival, six down the list, between the pale ales. We'll take it.
Why a cricket club
We think about architecture as more than bricks, mortar and materials. At its best it's social infrastructure: the thing that gives people a reason to be in the same place at the same time. A grassroots cricket club does that job without any help from architects. Three senior teams, six junior sides, women's and girls' cricket, and a bar that doubles as the town's function room. Generations mix there, and a shared sense of place gets built slowly.
Backing a club like Morley follows from the same belief. Both a good building and a good club depend on making somewhere people want to keep coming back to.
There's something in cricket specifically that matches how we work. Good architecture takes patience, stewardship and care, and it isn't built for the short term. A club runs on the same things: years of coaching, facilities kept in decent shape, and the torch passed on so the junior programme and the senior sides still exist in a decade. Supporting grassroots sport isn't a nice extra for us. It's an investment in whether the community we're part of is still healthy in twenty years.
Being honest about where we are
We haven't got a case study of enquiries won or a tidy line about return on investment, and we're not going to invent one. This is money spent on belief rather than results: a bet that showing up consistently is what earns trust, and that trust isn't something you can buy in a quarter.
What we want, over the next few years, is for we are _ to be the architecture studio the Morley community thinks of first, because they've seen us turn up again and again for something that matters to them.
Morley Cricket Club was the right place to start. Next season there'll be a board on the pitch, a sign on the benches, and Andrew on the boundary watching the juniors.
If you're planning work on a home in Morley or anywhere across West Yorkshire, have a look at how we work, try the fee calculator, or start a project and tell us about it.
Andrew & Jack
we are underscore