Market Square

Market Square is a new showroom and workshop for John Lee Motorcycles on one of the most prominent — and most sensitive — spots in a Northamptonshire market town. Hemmed in by its neighbours, overlooked by the church spire and sitting within the conservation area, it's a site where every decision has to respect a much-loved part of town.

Our scheme carefully reshapes the site while keeping its historic street frontage, making room for a building that puts a proper edge back on the square and gives a growing local business the space it needs. It's a project of constant conversation — the regular check-ins on site with the builder, the client and the conservation officers, where the small, site-specific decisions get talked through and made well.

The old stables had stood on the square since before the mid-1700s. Rather than send their limestone to a skip, the masons cropped it by hand with a guillotine over two weeks — more than twenty tonne bags of it — keeping the best blocks for quoins. That stone is going back into the new building, inside and out.

The new building is well under way, and we're back on site each month to record progress. The photos below run from the latest visit back to the start.