Course: MArch 1
Atelier: AND

Hi I am Owen. Current MArch 1 student in AND atelier. I graduated from Birmingham School of Architecture in 2023 and spent 2 years in practice, working mainly on residential projects in conservation areas and designing adaptive disabled housing. During my year out, I have gained valuable experience and skills which has made me a more competent designer and developed my pastoral skills.

I am interested in gaining a wider range of project experience involving local communities and creating space for a variety of people. Working with Life Leisure gives me an opportunity to design a space for all demographics in the community and focus on socialising and activity.

I am also looking forward to collaborating with my fellow MArch 1 students and learning from others and teaching what I have learned from my undergraduate and years out to the rest of the group: as well as enjoying designing together and producing some exciting work.

A short summary from our collaborator: Life Leisure written by Lisa Arrandale


The Active Communities team at Life Leisure is dedicated to improving health, wellbeing, and social connection across Stockport by making physical activity accessible to everyone. We work closely with local residents, community groups, and partner organisations to design programmes that break down barriers, build confidence, and create long‑term positive habits. Our focus is on supporting people who are least likely to engage in traditional leisure settings, ensuring that every individual feels welcomed, valued, and able to thrive.

By working with MSA students, we hope to bring fresh perspectives, creativity, and lived experience into our projects. Students can help us strengthen our understanding of diverse communities, co‑create engaging activities, and develop new approaches to outreach and communication. In return, we aim to offer meaningful real‑world experience, opportunities to lead and collaborate, and insight into community development and public health practice.

For our third official meeting we reflected on how we have been working as a group and what we could work on to improve our workflows and outputs over the coming weeks.

The overall consensus from the group that everyone was very happy with how we were working and communicating and dividing up work. Over the past weeks, we have been dividing up into smaller focus groups to complete tasks such as the poster or budget assessment. As a group we reflected that this was an efficient and effective way of developing collaborative work whilst understanding that all of us have very varied schedules, that don’t always correlate.

Moving on from our reflection we aim to communicate more consciously of other people's schedules and lives as well as maintaining how efficiently we have communicated and completed tasks. Furthermore, we are all eager to start designing a space and understanding the site and client better through client engagement activities and a community questionnaire. Over the next few weeks we will work in smaller focus groups to identify and critique site restrictions and conditions to help aid our design development in the near future.