Forever Island

CONTEXT
Longlisted Entry for the Davidson Prize 2025: Streets Ahead - The Race to Build 1.5 Million Homes. This year’s competition challenges design teams to propose creative, high-quality solutions for building 300+ homes on a UK or Irish site of their choice—helping meet the UK’s target of 1.5 million new homes in five years. Proposals must balance quantity with community wellbeing, equity, and innovation. Through our extensive experience in working with coastal communities we realise that they have sat at the periphery for too long, yet coastal living offers an amazing opportunity for new ways of life.

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COMMISSION‍
Forever Island is a community campus in Sandown, Isle of Wight, designed to address the island’s demographic time-bomb. The whole Island is a stunning UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve, a great place for a comfortable retirement. Yet, like many UK coastal towns, it struggles to retain its young people, who face limited career prospects, low-paid seasonal work and insecure housing. With no Island university, young residents leave for the mainland in search of better prospects, and don't return. The campus will transform opportunities, creating an affordable, lively and future-focussed community designed especially for young islanders.Developed with ecological designers Artecology and the IOW Youth Forum, we reimagine holiday park typologies: regenerative, modular, high-quality and affordable, with all the good vibes of seaside living. It offers a mix of micro-apartments, shared homes and connected, walkable communal spaces in a sociable coastal community.The campus integrates work and training, including biosphere conservation, maker-spaces, and a Sea Rangers programme delivering skills and employment. A network of future campuses spread out along the Sandown-Ryde trainline would accelerate the eco-cultural transformation the Island needs.With a focus on ecology, we capitalise on the drive for natural asset finance and investment. Conservation training schemes are funded through biodiversity credits and makerspaces design and build habitat products such as Artecology’s Naturebricks and Vertipools. By blending affordable housing, work opportunities and environmental stewardship, Forever Island offers a fresh vision for island living - one that transforms life prospects for young people while reviving the natural landscape forever.

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