A £30 million arts venue built over the retained shell of a 1970s theatre has reached the six-project shortlist for the 2026 RIBA Stirling Prize, with the jury naming BEAM’s extensive use of cross-laminated timber among three reasons the building stands as a compelling model for retrofit. That is according to the Royal Institute of British Architects, which unveiled the finalists for the UK’s top architecture prize on Thursday as the award marks its 30th year.
Wood runs through half the field, with oak carrying the structure and wall panelling of Witherford Watson Mann’s River Wing at Clare College, and open-air timber-framed walkways linking the old and new halves of Haworth Tompkins’ expansion of Pembroke College, both in Cambridge. Three of the six jury citations name timber, while the rest run on brick, clay, and glass.
“UK architecture is not only defined by style,” RIBA President Chris Williamson said of a shortlist he credits with true impact on people and place. Williamson called the six a distinguished addition to 30 years of Stirling Prize winners, spanning housing, civic reuse, transport, and two Cambridge colleges.
How the Stirling Prize shortlist gets chosen…
Reaching that shortlist takes two wins first: every building must take a RIBA regional award, then one of the 32 national awards handed out last week, before the institute cuts the field to six. Founded in 1834 and granted a royal charter three years later, RIBA restricts entry to its chartered architects and international fellows, and sends jurors to inspect each of the six finalists in person.
Judged for the first time on whole-life carbon data, the prize now asks every finalist to count the emissions built into its materials, and RIBA’s guidance warns that timber’s early carbon gains must be set against the cost of disposing of it at the end of life. The rules make that data compulsory for any project in line for the Stirling Prize, and for any project working to the RICS standard, with upfront and embodied carbon due at entry across the national awards.
Cross-laminated timber puts BEAM on the Stirling Prize shortlist…
Instead of demolishing the ageing theatre on the banks of the River Lea, the council-led project kept the original high-mass structure and wrapped it in sculpted new brickwork, a decision the jury says avoided “a massive carbon debt”. Reworked within its original volume, the former Hertford Theatre’s auditorium has grown from a single 400-seat house to 550 seats, with raked seating and a fully accessible technical grid hung from the cross-laminated timber superstructure.
Pitched-roof volumes built from brick-clad cross-laminated timber cluster around the retained auditorium, holding three cinema screens, a studio theatre, dance studios, and a café, with the windowless cinema blocks faced in patterned, locally sourced, handmade brickwork. Openings between the volumes turn a building that once faced inward out toward the town, the River Lea and its weir, and a Norman motte, while the tapering fly tower that defined the theatre for nearly 50 years still shows above the new brickwork.
Inside, exposed brick and cross-laminated timber run through the public spaces, a treatment the jury says brings “warmth, lightness, and sustainability without indulgence” and an intelligent use of budget. Little of the plan sits idle, and the jury concludes BEAM “does not simply meet modern standards” but “helps define them”.
“By part-reusing the old building and employing innovative materials like structural timber,” Bennetts Associates director Simon Erridge said when the venue opened, naming the two moves the practice is proudest of. The firm knows the material well, having won approval for a nine-storey cross-laminated timber office at London’s Brent Cross Town, part of a wave of UK architects designing in wood that now includes the country’s largest all-timber office in Clerkenwell.
Alongside it stands the River Wing at Clare College, where Witherford Watson Mann Architects built a prefabricated laminated oak structure, rising between one and three storeys against a flank wall of the Grade I-listed college, threading step-free routes, kitchens, and informal dining spaces past planted courtyards and exposed original brickwork. At the river end the oak gives way to a timber-lined café and event space with a terrace and pergola, a room the college’s Senior Tutor calls “a place people come as equals”.
A win would make Witherford Watson Mann only the third practice in 30 years to take back-to-back Stirling Prizes, after WilkinsonEyre in 2002 and Zaha Hadid Architects in 2011, twelve months on from its 2025 win for the Appleby Blue Almshouse in Southwark. Access to the site was so tight that the team built a new bridge to carry the modular oak elements in, and the jury credited the way the architect, contractor, and craftspeople resolved the constrained heritage setting.
Completing the timber trio is Haworth Tompkins’ expansion of Pembroke College, the most significant since the fourteenth century, where open-air timber-framed walkways and biodiverse gardens link six retrofitted buildings to six new ones. Inside the converted United Reformed Church, a light-filled timber-framed foyer serves a flexible auditorium, with a climbing facility built into the church tower and a café set in the timber-panelled former library of Millstein House.
Behind the walkways, the new buildings lean on triple glazing, exposed thermal mass, and solar panels, while the whole site runs gas-free on air-source heat pumps and salvaged bricks, slats, and joinery have been worked back into the fabric. Upgraded insulation and glazing bring the six older buildings up to modern performance, and the scheme opens previously closed college grounds to the public.
Cross-laminated timber has reached this shortlist before, with the six-storey Barrett’s Grove named in 2017 and the CLT homes of Chowdhury Walk in 2024, and 2026 is the first field chosen with whole-life carbon data required of every finalist.
Outside the timber trio sit Sergison Bates’ brick-and-clay Fairmead House on the edge of Epping Forest, Mary Duggan Architects and RUFF’s 157-home Lion Green Road in Coulsdon, and Renzo Piano Building Workshop’s glass-fronted Paddington Square above one of London’s busiest rail interchanges. It comes as the six mirrored the national field RIBA announced last week, leaning on the institute’s East region, which takes four of the places, with Lion Green Road and Paddington Square the only finalists inside London.
On 15 October, RIBA will name the winner at London’s Old Billingsgate, the restored Victorian fish market on the Thames, where a cross-laminated timber theatre, an oak riverside café, and a set of timber walkways carry half the field into the 30th Stirling Prize.
