Mary Duggan Architects Completes 157-Home Lion Green Road Scheme

Mary Duggan Architects has delivered Lion Green Road, a residential-led scheme of five buildings containing 157 dwellings across 9,549 square metres in Coulsdon, London Borough of Croydon. The project completed in 2022.

The scheme occupies a verdant site within a geographical chalk basin, a landform that shapes both the drainage context and the setting the architects worked with. Five separate buildings, rather than a single mass, structure the development. For practitioners, that decision signals a dispersed model of density: 157 homes distributed across a landscaped basin instead of concentrated in one block.

Lorenzo Zandri and Rob Parrish photographed the completed project.

What surrounds the site?

The context is typologically varied, and the architects describe it precisely. To the south, on higher ground, an extensive low-rise green belt development by Barratt Homes delivers 667 homes alongside retained, extensive lush open land. That neighbour is roughly four times the scale of Lion Green Road itself. To the north, a traditional low-rise suburban grain populates the site's edge, with terrain ascending toward Crystal Palace.

The comparison matters. The Barratt scheme demonstrates volume housebuilding at green belt scale; Mary Duggan Architects' project sits between that and the older suburban fabric. Five buildings give the scheme a grain closer to the northern context than to the southern megadevelopment.

What does the chalk basin setting change?

Coulsdon's chalk basin gives the site its landscape character, which the architects describe as verdant. The description frames the project as landscape-led: the buildings sit within established green surroundings rather than fronting a street wall or an urban block edge. This is a suburban model with a verdant basin at its centre.

The area figure of 9,549 square metres across 157 dwellings yields an average of roughly 61 square metres per home — a benchmark readers can weigh against their own residential schemes.

Who delivered it and when?

Mary Duggan Architects designed the project, which dates to 2022. The practice, led by the architect formerly of Duggan Morris Architects, has built a portfolio of residential and cultural work in London and beyond. The text description of the scheme comes from the architects themselves, and the figures cited here — 157 dwellings, five buildings, 9,549 square metres — are drawn from that project documentation.

Lion Green Road adds to Croydon's growing stock of residential-led development in Coulsdon, where the Barratt Homes green belt scheme of 667 homes and the retained open land around it define the competition for landscape quality. How the five buildings age within their chalk basin setting will test whether dispersed density can hold its value against volume housebuilding next door.