Ben Bolgar MVO BA BArch Hons DipArch MArch FRSA RIBA RIAS

Ben is Senior Director at the Prince’s Foundation and Design Director of the development company, Stockbridge Land. At the Foundation he has led collaborative planning and design frameworks that cover city expansions, new towns, brownfield remediation, town centre regeneration, heritage, ecological and healthcare projects.

Ben has been the strategic masterplanner for Sherford (7,000 homes), Nansledan (4,000 homes), Faversham (2,800 homes), Fort Mac, Atlanta (2,000 homes), Libreville, Gabon (75,000 homes), as well as the architect for the Prince’s Natural House at the Building Research Establishment. In 2007 Ben led the national defense infrastructure strategy for the restructuring of UK’s defense estate. He also led the team working on instigating neighbourhood planning in England and has also recently run an exemplar charrette for the government.

Ben structured the competition for the Armed Forces Memorial and has been panel member and design adviser for St. Martin in the Fields, Kensington Palace, Hillsborough Castle, Charterhouse, Clandon Park, the Royal College of Music, Chelsea Barracks and Tintagel Bridge.

Ben is an honorary fellow at the University College of Estate Management, a visiting fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford and has taught or lectured at Oxford, Notre Dame, Yale, Andrews and Robert Gordon Universities. He previously sat on the Prime Minister’s Design and Estate Regeneration panels and currently sits on the Building Better Building Better Commission as an adviser and chair of the collaboration working group. He has authored a number of reports, including Building a Legacy: A Landowner’s Guide to Popular Development and regularly contributes to the national press and technical journals. He has also authored two planning toolkits, Beauty in My Back Yard and the Mayor’s Toolkit for Planning for Rapid Urbanisation.

Ben and his team have won numerous awards, including the CNU Charter Award for Crewkerne (2006), the Brownfield Briefing Award for Coed Darcy (2016), the Civic Voice Award for Alder Hey Children’s Hospital (2016), the American Planning Association’s Pierre L’Enfant Award (2016) and the Driehaus Form-Based Codes Award (2018) for Libreville, Gabon.

Ben is a member of the RIBA, RIAS, the Architecture Club, a Fellow of the RSA and board member of Form Based Codes Institute, Stroma consulting and the MSc in Historic Preservation for Notre Dame University. Ben was made a Member of the Royal Victorian Order for his work at the Prince’s Foundation in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2019.