A Shared Brief for Better Design

Derby is a city read first in stone. The Cathedral’s gothic tower rises to 65 metres, a pale, square marker that has steadied the skyline for five centuries; inside hangs the oldest ring of ten bells in the world, which still sound out across the city at set hours.

Around it, the valley carries the memory and fabric of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site, a landscape that begins at the Silk Mill and runs north through the river towns, which fixes a higher duty of care on views and height. For most of its history, the skyline has read low against the 65-metre tower, so taller proposals are scrutinised carefully for their effect on views, streets and the World Heritage setting. Where height has come forward, it has tended to arrive as isolated towers rather than planned clusters, which makes the townscape test sharper. Recent city-centre bids have tightened public scepticism about height for height’s sake, even as brownfield targets pull policy toward greater density in the core.

Derby had a population of roughly 274,100 residents in 2024. The new Standard Method set local housing need at 906 homes a year, and the council’s latest five-year statement works on 917 homes a year, with only 2.70 years of deliverable supply at 1 April 2025. This is the context that Suki Sehmbi stepped into at Derby City Council when he joined in April 2024 as an Urban Design Planner and Public Practice Associate. “Derby hasn’t historically had tall buildings,” says Suki. “And there have been tall buildings in the past that were poorly designed, which has created a negative perception.” His task is to help the city place height where it belongs and defend the quality of what goes up, becoming the in-house design voice in a city weighing scale and setting. That mix of pressure and caution is why the conversation about height in Derby needs clear evidence and a shared brief.

Suki grew up in Derby, which gives him a deep read of the city’s context and long-running sore points. He brings day-to-day design judgement into the service. Trained as an architect, his remit spans caseload, policy, and the tools that make decisions faster and clearer: a City Centre Design Guide and a Public Realm Strategy, a citywide digital twin, and a new Design Optimisation Service to make pre-applications collaborative and visual.

Paul Clarke, the Head of Planning at Derby City Council, and Suki’s line manager, describes the immediate impact he’s had: “Suki’s been a breath of fresh air… he’s only been here for just over a year, but he’s done so much.” On ordinary weeks, he sketches capacity and massing studies for long-stalled sites, sits in on contentious schemes, and helps draft design policy. The value to colleagues is a live design vocabulary in the room. “My planning colleagues were already able to talk about design, my practice experience augments and expands on this existing knowledge in the council”, Suki explains. Inside the team that shows up as quick round-tables and mark-ups, explains Paul: “If any of the planners had an issue on design terms, they ask, ‘What does Suki think?’ straight away.”

Suki’s local knowledge is practical, not nostalgic. “I have a deep connection and understanding of the context and of the issues in Derby and what works, what doesn’t,” he says, recalling how a big shopping centre shifted the axis of retail within the centre and how “Derby’s never really recovered from that,” which now steers his calls on scale and mix. Paul sees the advantage in fit and pace: “Suki was local… his parents live in Derby… but we would never have found him [via our normal recruitment].” Recruitment is difficult; at senior grades there are fewer applicants. “We advertised for conservation and enforcement and over four or five years had about three applicants; you cannot build a service like that,” Paul said of the difficulties of recruitment in the public sector, and therefore, Public Practice was necessary to help with this process. It “took a lot of the heavy lifting out of hiring by getting the advert in front of the right people, pre-screening and skills-matching… setting up interviews and sorting references and HR admin. It was a good investment and a really good way to get Suki in… a slick process and useful to see a lot of the process done for us; I’d do it again.”

It’s the combination of Derby and Public Practice that matters here: rooted knowledge and a recruitment route that actually reaches experienced designers, with Public Practice handling some of the more time-hungry steps.

Suki has been working on the introduction of Derby’s new Design Optimisation Service, providing applicants with solution-focused architectural, urban and landscape design advice, as an extension to the existing pre-application service offered. This is an optional offer that kicks in early and can return later when schemes stall. It runs as a workshop rather than a back-and-forth of formal correspondence: applicants, case officers, and Suki gather around a table, pens out, testing options in real time. The point is to show, rather than tell. Mark-ups replace paragraphs, sections, and axos stand in for hedged prose.

“A lot of the time, the planning department, when it gives advice, is focused on highlighting what the problems are. The Design Optimisation Service is about offering solutions as well.”, Suki says. “If there is something wrong with the scale or massing, we sit down in a workshop, in an interactive way, using verbal and visual means to help the applicant understand and discuss possible [design] options. It becomes much more collaborative and dialogue-based, rather than just saying it’s not good enough, go away and fix it.” The tone is candid and practical: what would unlock this corner? Where does the core go? How does the ground floor read on the street? By the end, everyone leaves with the same sketch, the same list, the same next step. This workshop is followed by a ‘Recommendations Form’, which includes written and visual recommendations that arise from the meeting.

Legal and governance frameworks have been built in to enable officers to work openly without compromising the process. “We can’t promise permission… it’s guidance,” Suki says. These workshops de-risk and demystify the system for applicants, and they bring drawing back into planning for officers who are used to text-heavy reports. A few red lines can save weeks of emails. Expected gains are simple to measure: fewer late redesigns, clearer minutes that translate into cleaner submissions, and a visual language that helps members and consultees see what is meant. Over time, that should result in better plans on first submission and fewer debates about avoidable changes at the eleventh hour.

Alongside that shift in process, the tools are changing too. Derby already had a digital massing model, a Planning Delivery Grant throwback that Paul, Suki’s manager, calls “very, very basic… blocks of buildings with no fenestration,” useful for a stroll-through and little else.

Suki took that as his starting point and drove the upgrade himself, making the funding case, running procurement, clearing GDPR and information governance, and cycling the rising costs back through finance until the numbers held. “You could ‘walk’ down the street, but it wasn’t realistic.” says Paul “He took that and just got on with it: made the funding case, did the legwork through procurement, dealt with GDPR and information governance. The costs went up, so he went back to finance and rebased it. He did all that on his own. There was no spare capacity; nobody else to pick it up. We’ll run a training session for members; if you’re worried about something being a certain height, let’s put it into the model and see.”

Live schemes will be integrated into the model, allowing officers to test massing and daylight against the Cathedral tower and the World Heritage Site setting in the same view. They will then sit with members to discuss what the eye sees, rather than debating across paragraphs. The same tool will underpin officer training and help with appraisals on stalled brownfield plots, giving a shared base before drawings harden and positions do too. It is built for the exact bind set out at the start: new housing on finite land, higher density in a city that reads its skyline in stone, and a public conversation that needs more evidence and less heat. The aim is to shorten the loop to decision by showing what height means in context, with everyone looking at the same thing.

The same company that built Derby’s digital twin developed the model now in use in Watford, which the council then used to open up community engagement. The twin goes out to the public through drop-ins where residents explore proposals in a browser or headset, with street-level views, shadows and sightlines shown on screen. In Watford, people could “ride” the proposed Green Loop in VR at public events, widening who took part and how feedback was given. Derby will be able to mirror that approach, using it to make public engagement more interactive and most importantly, exciting.

These new tools will be put to work for major new developments coming through in the area. Great British Railways has chosen Derby as the location of its new headquarters. This will reset the area around the station and throws a spotlight on the car parks and leftover plots that pool around it. An Interim Planning Guidance (IPG) document followed for the land around the station, written to signal scale, uses and quality while the formal plans for the headquarters move ahead. “Derby was picked to be the location of the Great British Railways headquarters, and that has acted as a catalyst to really improve the area around the station, which is mostly under-utilised land and surface car parks,” Suki says. “The IPG is there to guide development: to identify the appropriate scale, set out lots of residential and commercial uses around the station, and improve the station itself to create a new gateway into the city.” The intent is urban, welcoming.” On the ground, the IPG gives applicants a live brief and gives officers something to point to when massing grows or ground floors thin out, so the conversation starts from an agreed ambition. Read alongside the twin, it allows members to see proposals in context, then judge them against a clear statement of what good looks like for this cluster of brownfield sites. The effect is to align decision-makers and landowners early, lift the baseline for design, and make that front door feel like a place rather than a gap between car parks.

This work on the urban experience in Derby continues across the city. The City Centre Design Guide and a new Public Realm Strategy work on the streets most people use every day.

The design guide follows the ten design principles of the National Design Guide, split between an in-depth character and context analysis of the centre and a second section that shows what that would look like on the ground. Suki wants it read as a toolkit that developers and architects can use from the first sketch, and as an educational prompt for officers who need a clear, shared baseline. “It would be available online… almost like a checklist,” he says. The Public Realm Strategy is an ongoing piece of work that takes the next step. “The design guide’s more about setting up principles,” Suki says; the strategy giving proposals for the streets and squares that need attention. Together, they lock in the culture shift already underway through the drawing-led workshops. Mark-ups and section cuts are incorporated into policy and project briefs, so the way Derby discusses quality is reflected in the way Derby now documents and codifies that same quality.

Inside the team, the language has changed. Informal roundtables and quick markups have replaced long email chains, and officers default to a common vocabulary of plan, section and elevation. That confidence shows up across the council’s placemaking workshop too, which Suki, “off his own back”, says Paul, pulled together so regeneration, estates and economic development could solve problems in the same room. The resourcing choice behind it was as stark as it sounds. “His post was only temporary… but I made it permanent,” Paul says. He made the case and took it through finance and HR, transferring budget from a retiring Group Manager post and making the fixed-term role permanent. He then covered the Group Manager duties himself while the restructure settled. “We did a bit of a deal… but the benefit is, we’ve got Suki.” The result is a planning service that argues for quality with the in-house skill to hold that line.

The pieces are falling into place. The Station Quarter Interim Planning Guidance is adopted and live as of August 2025, giving the station gateway a clear brief while the Local Plan refresh runs on. The citywide digital twin has been commissioned, with Digital Urban appointed on a three-year contract valued at some £70,000 to produce it. The Design Optimisation Service is scheduled to launch in December, offering a collaborative and dialogue-based solution to schemes that need refining and revision. Across these three offerings, officers will approach applicants with solution-oriented, drawing-led advice. The City Centre Design Guide and the Public Realm Strategy are still in development, and will move forward to lock those habits into everyday schemes from the earliest stages.

The lesson from Suki’s placement at Derby is to start with people who know the place: local knowledge shortens the route to what works and what does not.

Bring spatial skills in early and make them collaborative. Workshops and hand sketches cut through where long reports stall, and they build a shared language that officers can carry into negotiations. Invest in visuals and tools that decision-makers can immediately read and put everyone in the same scene. Pair interim guidance with that live dialogue so strategic areas have a clear brief before policy catches up. Accept that procurement and finance need a champion at the wheel, and that innovation and progress happen when people are given agency and space to think beyond their job descriptions.

The goal is to resist the steady pressure to water down details after permission is granted and keep the design intent intact through delivery. Picture a committee room around the model, a sketch spread on the table, the Station Quarter map beside it. The tools are in place to ensure decisions are clear and specific. The challenge is to use them consistently until this exceptional work becomes the default.