The ‘future makers’ who revel in ‘it’ll never work’ mantra

The 25-year history of Rotunda developers Urban Splash is on display in Birmingham as part of a retrospective exhibition of the company’s developments.

The business, founded in the North West by Tom Bloxham and Jonathan Falkingham, was at the forefront of regenerating unloved and rundown city centre sites, helping to change the approach to residential-led regeneration of major cities.

The RIBA North exhibition, It Will Never Work, curates the landmark projects from Urban Splash’s 25 years, including Fort Dunlop and Rotunda in Birmingham. It also looks to the future and its Port Loop scheme near Edgbaston Reservoir.

“It’s quite unusual to work with a developer on an exhibition, but that comes from the developer being quite unusual,” said Suzy Jones, director, RIBA North – National Architecture Centre. “Urban Splash were future makers – they helped to create the future.”

Falkingham believes Urban Splash’s success is down to “thinking about the positives and having a bit of vision”, as well as being persuasive.

“We need to be pioneering but we also need our first customers to be pioneering as well,” he said.

The company has been doing that for more than two decades transformed key sites across the North and Midlands. It started with Liverpool’s Concert Square before racking up a long list of projects, including Timber Wharf in Manchester, Bradford’s Lister Mills, the Midland Hotel in Morecambe and Sheffield’s Park Hill.

Its landmark Birmingham developments are also a key part of Urban Splash’s story.

“Fort Dunlop is the biggest single building we have ever redeveloped – creating 400,000 sq ft of workspace, retail space and a hotel,” said Falkingham. “It was a big success and brought an important structure back to life.”

Fort Dunlop

Equally with Rotunda, we spent a lot of time in Birmingham during its redevelopment, ensuring we’d correctly gauged what people wanted from the project to help us preserve an important icon.”

“It doesn’t seem like 25 years,” said Bloxham. “It was me and Jonny in a shed and now there’s £1bn of developments. There’s a huge legacy.

“I’m proud of the variety of developments. There’s a quality and a theme running through our work.”

They also don’t hide from the fact the business got close to not being around to celebrate its silver anniversary, with part of the exibition labelled “what doesn’t kill you”.

The firm was pushed to the brink during the recession, with the credit crunch stopping its customers getting mortgages, which opened up a £60m hole in its accounts.

It was forced to slash its 300-strong workforce down to just 50, before slowly rebuilding to the 170 people it employs today. Its latest accounts, for the year to September 2017, showed profits of £6.5m as it looks forward to large-scale developments in Milton Keynes, North Shields and Bristol.

As a self-confessed fan of canals – he has walked from Manchester to London along the towpaths – Bloxham is excited about Urban Splash’s next big Birmingham scheme at Port Loop.

“We want to start to rethink what city centre living is all about – places where you can relax, places where you can play out – and we want to turn Port Loop into one of the best places to live in Birmingham,” he said.

“It’s a huge privilege to find a site that’s actually an island, it’s like finding a gem.

“It’s a blank canvas. We can put a bit of the flair and place making that we have been practising for the last 25 years.

“That’s exactly the same as a lot of our projects, like Fort Dunlop and Rotunda, but most of those sites didn’t have as much going for them as Port Loop.”

The exhibition is open now and is being hosted at Glenn Howells Architects until July 17, before it moves on to London in September.