Back to the future: A visit to the Bartlett Summer Show 2025

Last week, a few of us from Stories took an evening to visit the Bartlett Summer Show at UCL. Each of us brought a guest, and after exploring the exhibition, we all gathered for dinner to share thoughts and compare impressions.

The show was brilliant. It was impossible to leave without feeling both admiration and a renewed sense of urgency. The creativity on display, and the way students engaged with the future of cities, the climate crisis, material experimentation, and the act of making (and critically re-making) - all while embracing the messiness of real life - was a powerful reminder of the potential design holds when it

hasn't yet been asked to compromise.

What struck me most wasn’t just the quality of the work (though much of it was exceptional), but the energy, drive, and a quiet but palpable sense of activism simmering beneath the surface. These students aren’t accepting the world as it is, nor are they treating development and progress as linear concepts. Instead, they’re proposing regenerative forms of design and circularity as fundamental drivers of change. There were speculative futures, poetic re-imaginings of overlooked places, sharp critiques of existing systems, and deeply personal provocations. It reminded us why we do what we do - and how often it’s fresh perspectives that spark meaningful, lasting change.

Over dinner, our conversation ranged from architectural education to community-led design, from the role of AI to questions of viability and the realities of life in the ‘real world’. Interestingly, quite a few of us started our careers in architecture before stepping toward development.

It may seem like a small thing, but it felt like one of those evenings that affirms something important: that we should continue to be ambitious for the future of our built environment. That we need to make space to look up and importantly back at ourselves. That architecture and development should be in constant conversation. And that the future we want will only emerge if we stay open - to challenge, to creativity, and to fundamentally asking better questions.

To those who created the work: thank you. We left reminded of the privilege - and responsibility - that comes with shaping the built environment. We’ll be back next year.