21st January 2026.
TOWN receives commendation at the TET awards 2025.
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TOWN has received a commendation at the 2025 TET Awards, recognising best practice in engaging children and young people in the built environment. The awards are run by the Thornton Education Trust and celebrate organisations demonstrating meaningful impact, innovation and leadership.
The commendation, in the category of Best Development Company, reflects TOWN’s commitment to embedding the voices and everyday experiences of children and young people into the planning, design and delivery of neighbourhoods.
TOWN’s approach to creating a better built environment for children and young people brings together strategy, practice and advocacy.
An engagement session with school children in Cambridge.
An engagement session with school children in Cambridge.
Designing with children in mind
Child-friendly design is embedded within TOWN’s Impact Framework and applied from site selection through to post-occupancy. Every project is required to demonstrate how it supports children in homes, streets, play spaces and everyday movement.
This approach is applied at all scales. Housing developments currently coming forward at Northstowe, Wolverton and Hemel incorporate streets and spaces that prioritise children, including car-play streets inspired by the successful car-free street at Marmalade Lane. These schemes also provide a range of spaces for children to play, socialise and experience nature as part of everyday life. At Northstowe, proposals were also tested against the principles set out in All to Play For by Dinah Bornat, providing a practical lens for assessing the quality, inclusivity and everyday value of streets and spaces for children.
At a larger scale, TOWN developed a Child-Friendly Design Strategy for the Hartree project in Cambridge. The strategy provided a framework for evaluating and evolving a masterplan for 5,600 homes, grounded in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and setting clear, measurable principles around play, safety, access and participation. Although the project was subsequently cancelled at a national policy level, the work continues to inform TOWN’s wider practice.
An engagement session with school children in Cambridge.
Listening, learning and co-creating
TOWN recognises that listening to children is essential to creating places that genuinely meet their needs. Over many years, the team has worked closely with children and young people through workshops with local schools and youth organisations, arts and crafts programmes, and community events and festivals.
At Love Wolverton, TOWN worked with primary and secondary school pupils through Minecraft-based design workshops, using play as a way for young people to influence the emerging masterplan. The team also undertakes post-occupancy interviews with young residents to understand how completed neighbourhoods perform in everyday life.
Influencing change in the sector
TOWN plays an active role in promoting child-friendly approaches across the wider built environment sector. Learning is shared through policy engagement, conferences, academic forums and open publication, helping to raise expectations and standards across the industry.
In recent years, TOWN has given evidence to a parliamentary select committee inquiry on children, young people and the built environment, and spoken at a range of national and international events, including the 2025 Start With Children Summit in Bratislava.
Reflecting on the recognition, TOWN said:
“Working directly with children and young people has exposed how poorly the development industry often serves them and, by extension, other groups whose voices are rarely heard. They are frank in a way adults rarely are, quick to point out if something feels boring or unfair. Their honesty helps us spot blind spots in our own assumptions and helps us see a place through fresh eyes.
Through our projects, we’ve seen that engaging young people early doesn’t just lead to better play spaces or safer streets; it reshapes priorities for the whole community.”
The Common House at Marmalade Lane, Cambridge.
The TET Awards commendation reinforces TOWN’s belief that designing with children in mind leads to more inclusive, resilient and genuinely liveable places for everyone.
