Welcome to the website of the Royal Fine Art Commission Trust Building Beauty Awards.
The awards celebrate the best of beautiful new architecture – and because each one of us is affected by the presence or absence of beauty, we’d like your input. Can you think of a beautiful new building that makes you happy, that you would take a detour to see, that makes a street you know a more delightful place? You might have designed a building that has just that effect. If so, please think about entering it for the 2026 awards, for which online entries will be open via this website from spring next year. There are also categories for engineering structures, streetscape/public space and small physical interventions (we’re calling them Little Gems) that make a neighbourhood a jollier place to be. So don’t forget to nominate whatever piece of creative excellence gives you a lift whenever you see it.
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The cosmologist Lord Rees of Ludlow O.M. F.R.S. presented the 2025 Awards at Quo Vadis, London W1 in November 2025 in the presence of His Royal Highness The Duke of Gloucester, K.G., G.C.V.O., Patron of The Royal Fine Art Commission Trust. The winning projects (see ‘Winners’ tab in the menu bar above for more details) were:
Grand Winner and Little Gem Award Winner / The Story of Emily, St. Ive, Cornwall (Stonewood Design for the Emily Estate / The Newt in Somerset) Privately-funded museum documenting the life and work of Emily Hobhouse, who campaigned against the use of concentration camps in the Boer War. Together with the Victorian rectory, where Emily lived as a child, the new museum is the twin focus of an estate restored and reinvented by the South African investor Koos Bekker. The project team are shown above receiving their award from The Duke of Gloucester, Lord Rees of Ludlow and Stephen Bayley (Chairman of the Royal Fine Art Commission Trust) (Photo: Ollie Grove).
Building Award Winner / Centre of Excellence for Heritage Craft Skills, York Minster (Tonkin Liu Architects for the Chapter of York) Workshops, training facilities and accommodation for apprentice stonemasons, on a site within the Minster precinct and abutting the city walls.
Public Space Award Winner / V&A Storehouse East, London E20 (Diller, Scofidio + Renfro with Austin-Smith:Lord for the Victoria & Albert Museum) Publicly-accessible depository for the V&A’s collections in storage, set within the Here East building in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The items on display are spread over four floors, with a central rectangle cut out to form a grand hall.
Engineering Award Winner / Rafter Walk, Canada Dock, London SE16 (Whitby Wood, Asif Khan Studio and Townshend Landscape Architects for British Land in Joint Venture with AustralianSuper). 140ft hardwood and steel boardwalk skirting the western side of Canada Dock in Rotherhithe, with newly-formed wetlands filling the space between the bridge and the dock edge.
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In 2022 and 2023, with sponsorship from Ballymore, the Building Beauty Awards offered the biggest cash prize (£12,000) in UK architecture, as well as a trophy crafted by the renowned jeweller Theo Fennell. The overall winners went on to represent the UK at the World Architecture Festival, as the British entry for the Royal Fine Art Commission Trust International Building Beauty Prize.
Why these awards?
There are plenty of architecture awards, so why these ones? We’re running them because architecture is the only art that none of us can avoid. Whether we spend much time thinking about architecture or not, we all consume it on some level, whether we live or work in a building, visit it, pass it by or just glimpse it on the morning commute. In a fractured world, it’s one of the last great shared experiences.
And what we see affects our mood. Buildings have the power, at their best, to lift us up – at their worst, to depress us. Between one extreme and the other, the impact on our wellbeing can be considerable. So every one of us has skin in this game, and we all have a right to say what works for us.
Of course we know that successful architecture is about more than surface appearance. There are lots of things a building ought to be, functional and sustainable among them. But the outside of a building is all most of us see of it; so how it presents itself externally is important. When buildings delight those who have to look at them, they add real social value.
Why now?
Beauty in buildings has been topical in recent years, and rightly so. The National Planning Policy Framework was revised to give councils more power to reject applications on aesthetic grounds, meaning that whether a building was beautiful really did affect whether it was built. This formal beauty requirement has now been reversed, but regardless of that planning authorities should still be thinking about the visual impact of new development.
Local authority resources are of course limited and their judgements aren’t always consistent, so guidance is helpful. The last Government gave them some, in the form of design codes. But it will still be useful, we think, for planning committees and developers to have a body of live examples to draw on. By holding up examplars and advertising excellence, we hope these awards will help.
Not everyone, of course, will agree with the conclusions of our award judges. We don’t expect them to or even necessarily want them to. What we want to do is get people thinking – and then, we hope, get them demanding buildings that look good and make our daily lives richer and better.