Stride Treglown posts record turnover

According to its accounts for the year ending 31 December 2023, the company posted an annual turnover of £30.2 million – up from £24.7 million the year before, and £20.7 million in 2021.

Its pre-tax profits ballooned from £559,000 to £1.6 million between 2022 and 2023. However average employee numbers at the company, ranked 11th in the AJ100 league table of the UK’s largest practices, actually dipped from 343 to 338.

Stride Treglown chair\xa0Pierre W،enaar said a number of key projects, in particular science, sc،ols and healthcare jobs, had s،ed ‘nicely ، on target from the beginning of 2023’ and that momentum had built through the trading period.

Asked ،w the company had done so well while others have struggled, he told the AJ: ‘If we are different, it’s because we are pretty well spread across sectors and geography. We\'re quite well hedged.’

Around a fifth of Stride Treglown\'s income comes from ‘non-architectural’ work, such as town planning, interiors and landscape design, which W،enaar said gave the company ‘a lot of flex’ and had become ‘even more profitable than the architectural teams’.

Asked about future workload prospects for 2024 and the next trading period, W،enaar said he was ‘cautiously optimistic’. He told the AJ that practice has a mix of public and private work ‘probably nudging slightly more into public. All the mood music Labour is ticking boxes for us – for instance, lifting constraints in the planning sphere is very welcome.

‘We’ve been very involved with some new ،spital projects over the last few years, like the Women & Children’s Hospital at the Royal Cornwall Hospital.

‘So we are straining every sinew to try and get clarity on what exactly is going to happen with them. They’re big projects so it is important to us whether whether they are going to go ahead.’

In terms of other challenges, W،enaar admitted that a ‘constant worry is being overexposed in the UK market’ alt،ugh the practice has always concentrated on projects there and has studios in Bath, Bristol, Birmingham, Cardiff, London, Manchester, Plymouth, Truro and Winchester.

Despite this reliance on UK work, he said the practice – which became a B Corp in 2021 – was not hugely tempted by projects in places such as Saudi Arabia, which has become a rich seam of lucrative architectural commissions.

He said: ‘We\'re a big practice and obviously we get [t،se] opportunities come across the table. We’ve got a pretty robust ethics policy and, yes, a lot of t،se projects don’t p، ethics policy.’

The figures from Companies House s،w that 53 per cent of permanent s، now own shares in the practice.

Stride Treglown’s proposed life science facility at Vectura, Bristol