RIBA Reveals Winners of 2025 National Architecture Awards

Prime Highlights

RIBA announces 20 winners of its powerful 2025 National Awards, highlighting UK’s best in innovative and sustainable architecture.
Award honors design excellence in justice buildings, community housing, and extensive restoration projects.

Key Facts

Over half of award-winning projects were refurbishment or reuse based and achieved RIBA’s sustainability goals.
Two justice-sector buildings debuted, based on trauma-informed and humane design principles.

Key Background

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has named the 20 winners of its 2025 National Awards, an award of great esteem for Britain’s top examples of architecture. From 1966, the awards each year have acknowledged creativity, sustainability, and social worth in the built environment. The 2025 winners include England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and range from restoration to heritage to community housing, civic buildings, and social infrastructure.

One of the leading-edge 2025 priorities is rehabilitation and justice. The two leading-edge justice-sector projects selected were a new women’s centre in Southampton and a young offender prison in Scotland. Both are both a human-centered, trauma-informed design and a radical shift in the role of architecture in enabling dignity and rehabilitation. Both projects were commissioned outside the usual government procurement process, a bold step in public-sector design.

But there is another aspect of the awards this year that is focus on conservation and reuse sustainability. Iconic like Elizabeth Tower, home of Big Ben, re-committed to reasonable craftsmanship, traditional building practice, and dedication to conservation of the country’s heritage. Restoration in Scotland was also undertaken at Fairburn Tower and the Aldourie Castle Estate too demonstrate how older and neglected sites are susceptible to sympathetic reuse for alternative uses.

Community design also dominated among the winners. Appleby Blue Almshouse and Citizens House gave high priority to affordability, sustainability, and communal housing as proof of how architecture can be used to promote social well-being. The buildings were not only green, but they were also built in close consultation with the interests of the surrounding communities.

Collectively, the 2025 RIBA National Awards consider the evolving role of the profession: keeping an eye on the past, charting the turmoil of the present, and projecting the future—while confronting the double challenge of climate crisis and social inequality.