Since 2023, LA London has been a proud member of PRIME, a platform for businesses that share a commitment to the environment and the communities they serve. Each year, PRIME awards its members a score based on their progress towards meeting six core principles:

1. Being environmentally better

2. Embracing sustainable innovation

3. Spreading the word

4. Delivering impact

5. Making a difference

6. Being accountable

This year, we were delighted to increase our PRIME score by an impressive margin, from 11 points to 14 – with special thanks to our sustainability team, led by architectural assistant Mai Smith.

Here are some of the positive changes we’ve made over the last year:

On our projects

Over the last year we have introduced a sustainability section in our client briefing questionnaires to assess and understand our clients’ aspirations and allow us to set clear sustainability goals for projects from the outset. Our aim is to steer clients towards more sustainable solutions and better decisions. We have also built a ‘Sustainability Strategy’ template to be used on all our projects moving forward.

Recent sustainability measures on residential projects include a large (10,000l) rainwater harvesting system to provide garden irrigation at a home in St George’s Hill. We also installed a biomass boiler at a large country manor, fuelled by the estate’s coppicing cycle, and integrated a reed bed waste water-filtering system into another rural home.

We always encourage contractors to reuse or repurpose materials that have been stripped out during refurbishment via our project specifications. For example, on a recent project, we requested that rooflights removed from the existing building be reused or repurposed as they were only two years old.

We have also been rebuilding our materials library with the support of Susannah Howlett, adopting a simple 1 – 5 scoring system to evaluate the sustainability performance and lifetime carbon footprint of different products and systems. This helps us make more informed decisions during specification.

“Improving our PRIME score is a useful marker of progress, but more importantly it reflects a shift in how we operate day to day – from the decisions we make in the studio to the advice we give our clients.”

— Andrew Paulson, Managing Partner

For the team

Architectural assistant Mai Smith, LA London’s sustainability manager.

As part of her role as our sustainability manager, Mai Smith completed a carbon literacy course. This provided valuable insights into our current climate situation and actions that can be taken to improve our carbon emissions. Mai presented her learnings to our team and, together, we have worked through the actions that we can start implementing now.

Mai also attended a seminar on “Sustainable Certification, from ISO to B Corp”. Following this, LA London has made the decision to work towards B Corp certification. We have engaged a specialist consultant to assist us in this objective, which we hope to complete within 2026.

Architectural assistant Susannah Howlett has taken on a new role as manager of our materials library, evaluating the sustainability credentials of the products and systems we use and building a user-friendly internal database.

We have also implemented the Cycle to Work scheme, encouraging employees to choose more sustainable modes of transport. Partner Andrew Paulson made the decision to travel to MIPIM, the annual property conference in Cannes, this year by train instead of plane, reducing his carbon footprint by up to 95%.

This year, we are introducing a new company policy to allow all employees one paid day a year to volunteer for a worthwhile cause.

In our community

The LA team competes in Better Bankside’s annual pancake race

We have long been committed to our vibrant and inspiring community here in Southwark. As active supporters of our Business Improvement District Better Bankside, we took part in its annual charity pancake race again in February and regularly attend its events and courses. We made a donation to its Christmas gift appeal, which provided Christmas presents to local people. We also assisted a local neighbourhood café with planning issues they were experiencing on a pro bono basis.

Towards the end of last year, we made a donation to Place2Be and supported their annual carol concert, which raised £108,000. Place2Be is a children’s mental health charity with over 30 years’ experience working with pupils, families and staff in UK schools.

Within our industry, we offer support and opportunities to our peers by hosting regular breakfasts and networking activities. Most recently, we hosted an event aimed at junior/intermediate level professionals in the construction industry, and we plan for this to become a regular event. We also offer work experience placements to local schools and had three children join us for a week in 2025.

In the studio

We have taken measurable steps to reduce office waste by separating out paper towels and food waste for recycling. We have also switched to a new environmentally friendly brand of loo paper, ‘Who Gives a Crap’, which uses bamboo and recycled fibres instead of virgin forest pulp, reducing deforestation. We used 28% fewer rolls of loo paper in 2025 than in 2024!

By replacing our office gas barbecue with an infra-red one, we have eliminated direct fossil fuel consumption in the office.

We continue to present our weekly paper, electricity, and waste- and recycling-sack consumption to the whole team at our weekly meetings. We identify anomalies in the data and seek the causes to see if there is anything we can do to improve it.

Thanks to funding from Better Bankside, we have also been working with sustainability consultants Sustainable X, who have provided a carbon emissions model and training to improve our data quality and create a carbon reduction plan. This sets out our formal commitment to achieving Net Zero emissions by 2045.

We are delighted that our membership of PRIME has already had many benefits for our team, our community, our clients and the environment. Managing Partner Andrew Paulson comments, “Improving our PRIME score is a useful marker of progress, but more importantly it reflects a shift in how we operate day to day – from the decisions we make in the studio to the advice we give our clients. We see this as the start of a longer journey, not an endpoint. This year’s progress is only one step in a broader commitment to embed sustainability into everything we do – from our internal operations to the way we design and deliver projects. Our focus now is on building the systems and accountability needed to go further.”