Squires at 50: Still 'quietly surprising people'

Tuesday 03 November 2026

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David Taylor

Consultant Editor
NLA

Henry Squire

Senior Partner
Squire & Partners

Squires at 50: Still 'quietly surprising people'

David Taylor meets Squire & Partners senior partner Henry Squire to talk Brixton and beyond, grief, five-day weeks, screen golf, a drunken eight-page manifesto - and why, half a century on, the practice he runs would still rather surprise people than shout about itself.

'Quietly surprising people.'

That's the phrase Henry Squire chooses to describe the practice he runs – Squire & Partners – as it celebrates its 50th year in business this year.

'What we've always tried to do is quietly surprise people’ he says. ‘Just quietly, you know. Every now and then, we surprise people.'

What he means by that is that there is little or no fanfare, or glossy monographs, or the relentless drumbeat of thought leadership; just buildings that turn up and make people ask: who did that? In fact, Squire has an even better way of characterising the nature of the business, these days: 'I think in some ways we're sort of Sumo-work but Bonsai-PR, if you like. We don't shout very loud. We're not architects who are very good at all of that kind of stuff, and I think that's why we quietly surprise people.'

More than a safe pair of hands

We meet at the practice's Brixton headquarters, the former Bon Marché department store the practice has occupied for – surprisingly – coming up to a decade now. The move here in 2017, Squire says, was a statement in itself, picking up where the practice’s old offices and associated bar in King's Cross left off. 'King's Cross was very much about moving from a relatively small house in South Kensington and trying to convince the world that we were a serious architectural practice’, he says. ‘It did that in spades’. Even so, the perception lagged behind the work. 'We did some sort of miserable branding exercise a long time ago. Asked loads of clients, and they'd tell you "a safe pair of hands" and all this kind of stuff. But we didn't get much around design, even though we did a lot of it.' Brixton changed all that.

'It's really launched us into a different kind of world. Ministry of Sound came to us, and we've been involved in lots of different types of projects, largely on the back of this building and showcasing the creative side of Squire & Partners, not just the sensible commercial side of it.'

Resi to office

At its peak, the practice was 250-strong. Today it sits at 'around about the 100, 110 mark', but that contraction was not Brixton's fault. It was rather, in Squire's view, a case of getting too comfortable in one lucrative corner of the market: residential.

'We hit this rich seam of Chelsea Barracks, 20 Grosvenor Square, Clarges, Broadway, Palace Street, St John's Barracks.

We hit this high-end resi thing. I think a lot of developers forgot that we did offices. We stopped getting office work. We didn't chase it, perhaps because we were so busy.'

Then the market that had made them turned. 'For whatever reason - Brexit, Covid, taxation, inflation, I don't know - the bottom fell out of that high-end residential market, and we weren't replacing that work with something else.'

A shock to the system

There was another story from the last three years, though, that had far-reaching ramifications – the untimely death of Squire's father, the practice's founder Michael Squire, following complications from a routine procedure. Squire is candid about it, and about the gap between how it looked from outside and how it felt within. How did it affect business? ‘On a macro level, I don't think massively', he says, because the handover from Michael had been gradual and long, with Tim Gledstone, Murray Levinson (now with Amuma Projects) and Henry having been partners for 20 years. But on a personal level, says Squire, it was devastating, and perhaps on a morale level too. ‘It also coincided with the end of Covid and the economic situation.' Complications from a long-standing heart problem had ended abruptly in the worst possible way. ‘Someone like that, who's been such a big part of your life - my dad, and everybody's life here - suddenly goes like that. It was a big shock.'

He calls it 'a perfect storm of things', but is equally positive that the practice has come through. 'I think we have found our level now. We are a good practice. We have a phenomenal body of work, which myself and Tim [Gledstone] and the other new partners have been involved in for 20 years. We have the confidence to go it alone.'

Face to face

That confidence sits alongside firm convictions, chief among them a five-day-a-week office policy that has not wavered, even while much of the rest of the industry went hybrid. 'I passionately believe in it’, says Squire. ‘I've moved to Oxfordshire, and I get up at 5.30 every morning and do four hours a day commuting because I believe in it that much. No one can say, "oh, you live around the corner in Clapham, so it's easy for you". I probably have the longest commute, but that's what you need to do to be an effective architecture practice. It's so collaborative.'

Squire accepts that in the past this may have cost the firm recruits - 'not anymore, but I think we lost a lot when everybody else was offering it, compounded by the fact that we were shrinking anyway' - but is unmoved by the work-life balance framing. 'That work-life balance thing really kind of grates on me a bit, because work is part of life. It's work-life integration. So much of your life is spent at work, and if you think that shouldn't be a positive part of it, that's a very sad way of thinking.'

They try and build a family atmosphere, a community which is stronger than simply a place to do work, with a bar upstairs, alongside a general desire for staff to get to know each other on study trips and the like. Last year they took the Eurostar to Lille, for instance, but the practice also has a strong social scene throughout the year with summer days out, five-a-side football teams, softball teams, and ‘Firsty Fridays’ – half price beers in the (members) bar upstairs on the first Friday of every month.

On this theme, and only half-seriously, Squire points to the number of colleagues who have met partners at the practice - 'probably more than 10’ in 50 years - as evidence that the office is about more than just desks, but relationships and important social interactions. 'Being in an office where you get to meet people over a period of time, that's how you fall in love, right? These dating apps, that's what I think all these kids are struggling with, because you've got to almost decide on day one whether you're meeting again.'

Business matters

The entrepreneurial streak of the firm long predates the current generation. Michael Squire ran developments with a builder friend while Henry was growing up, and the firm followed suit, buying its own buildings, running its own bars such as St Chad’s in King’s Cross, back when the area was ‘hardcore’, and even operating an early virtual screen-urban golf business with sites in Soho, Kensington and Smithfield. 'We were the first people in Europe to do it,' Squire recalls, 'and that was quite fun.' Standing on the other side of the development table, he argues, forces a different kind of rigour. 'Because we have actually done it - bought a building, borrowed quite a lot of money, felt the pain and power of our own pencil - I think you do at least think a little bit more like a developer. When you're doing it for yourself and it's your own money, there is real pain.' Not all of the firm’s peers get that, he suggests.

Retrofit for purpose

That developer's instinct has fed directly into one of the practice's defining specialisms: reinventing existing buildings, long before retrofit first became an industry rallying cry. 'We've been doing it since day one,' Squire says, pointing to decades of reworking Derwent London's Victoria office stock, and a portfolio that now includes the old Daily Mail headquarters in Fitzrovia, the former Harrods Depository on Sloane Avenue, and recently Space House, the RIBA award-winning retrofit that has generated more coverage than almost anything else in the firm's recent history. 'It's been fantastic in terms of keeping our name out there,' he says, 'as part of a suite of buildings... taking buildings, breathing new life into them, keeping them and restoring them and bringing back their character, but moving them on to their next step in their journey.'

Lessons from the desert

Not every project for Squire has been a building, though. He has twice run a studio at Yale in the US with the engineer Patrick Bellew - 'known him for 30 years... he's like a 16-year-old in a 65-year-old body, infectious and cheeky and fun' - most recently sending students to design a visitor centre for Biosphere 2, the sealed ecological experiment built in the Arizona desert in the late 1980s by a band of self-styled ecological pioneers. 'It's an amazing story and an amazing building,' says Squire, and what he brought back to the practice wasn't a technique, but a way of thinking. 'It certainly reinforced thinking around environmental issues, and how you do it in a more meaningful way.'

The ‘amazing’ teaching experience has brought Squire a great deal of enjoyment but also a way of bringing back new thinking and reinforcing his own thinking particularly on environmental issues – but by the same token he regards teaching as being more about giving than receiving.

Hitting the half century

The firm’s 50th anniversary is being marked reasonably quietly: a year running April to April, a series of partner-written essays on the practice's history and preoccupations (Squire on its broader architectural philosophy, fellow senior partner Tim Gledstone on its long relationship with stone), an internal staff celebration and a bigger event planned for February next year. True to form, Squire wants that to surprise people rather than parade the back catalogue. 'We're hoping it's going to be a proper one. I've got a friend who does all the lighting for the Chemical Brothers, and I'm trying to get him and some of his production and video guys involved, to try and do something that might just surprise people a bit. It’s not going to be just loads of models. A proper party, but also with some stuff you might not expect from an architectural company. Which I think is what we’ve always tried to do with Squire & Partners'

The eight-page manifesto

Behind the celebration, the leadership is being deliberately reshaped. Where the practice ran for two decades with four partners, it now has eight, plus a tier of associate partners coming through - a change Squire sees as more than cosmetic. 'I think it does say we are a partnership, and we are all actually together, rather than there's four of us and everyone else has a very different title and role.' He is plotting his own retreat from the 'senior partner' title a management consultant talked him into. 'Very soon, and very quietly, I will drop that and we'll just have partners.'

Succession, unsurprisingly, is on his mind. 'That's my job now, really, at 53 - to start thinking about succession.' He wants young partners to challenge him the way he once challenged his father, recalling the night he and Gledstone, newly asked to join the partnership, got drunk, wrote an eight-page manifesto critiquing Michael Squire's design work and left it on his desk. 'The old man is waiting at the door for me... "You have the balls to write me an eight-page manifesto telling me how my design isn't good for what you want."' His father was furious, then eventually came round. 'I need someone to do that to me now,' Squire says. 'Someone that I respect, who can push me and go, "come on then".'

'You cannot AI that'

On the name, so tightly bound to a family that has lost its founder, Squire is unsentimental. 'A name just becomes a name eventually, right? But it does stand for something. Squire & Partners has got 50 years of pedigree behind it. If you change that name, everybody goes, "what's that place about?"'. The possibility of a name change comes up now and again, but with little enthusiasm behind altering it; it’s just a brand. A more concrete change however, will be a concerted push on getting more international work because London is ‘difficult’, expanding on the practice’s interiors work and perhaps even creating ‘Squire & Partners Technical’ to concentrate on the delivery end of projects in an evolving market.

Squire is equally clear-eyed about what comes next in terms of bricks and mortar, including the possibility - not imminent, but not dismissed either - of leaving Brixton for somewhere that better suits a smaller, more selective practice and ‘reinvents’ the office building again. ‘We like to move around. We always have moved around…There's a bit of me that wants to get that real buzz back, where you walk in, you see everybody, you hear conversations, telephones... I want to hear people shouting and having discussions on physical telephones.'

What Squire doesn't want, though, is to be defined by scale again. 'We just want to do good work and we want to build. Whatever size allows us to do that without maybe needing to get big again

As for the technology the profession is fretting about, he's relaxed. 'I'm not worried about AI. I think it'll just be a great tool, just like CAD was. Architecture is a human career. You have to negotiate, you have to talk to people, you've got to talk to local residents and planning officers and clients - and you cannot AI that.'

Indeed, he goes on, it used to be that a planning meeting was 80% design, 20% everything else, Squire adds. ‘Now it’s 80% carbon calculations and bats and newts and acoustics and 10-20% design’, he says ‘It’s sad, but we love it; we love what we do. We’re passionate about it and I think we’ve got a cracking team of partners of a similar age to us and some cracking young people who we are going to empower, like we were empowered’. They should not feel scared, in other words, to drop him an eight-page note or a manifesto for how things should be done.

My hour in Squire & Partners’ buzzing Brixton HQ is coming to a close. But, 50 years on from its foundation, the practice isn’t chasing headlines or building a monument to what it once was. It has absorbed major emotional change, shed more than half its peak staff numbers, rebuilt its leadership from the ground up and come out the other side, still doing what it always did best: getting on with high-quality buildings, quietly – and letting the city do the talking.

Image credits

Henry Squire portrait © Tom Oldham; 18–20 Greycoat Place, Brook House, Chelsea Barracks, The Broadway and Twenty Grosvenor Square © Jack Hobhouse; Clarges Mayfair and Hans Place © James Jones; Space House and The Squire, Albany Marina © Gareth Gardner; Msheireb Downtown Doha and Southbank Place © Hufton + Crow; Newcombe House and St Regis Abu Dhabi © Squire & Partners.

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David Taylor

Consultant Editor
NLA

Henry Squire

Senior Partner
Squire & Partners