Welcome to Iceni’s 2026 Yearbook. You can read the full edition here.

Polarisation isn’t just a headline for us; it’s showing up in our workload. Private-for-sale housing has markedly reduced in places, sometimes replaced by exciting build-to-rent or purpose-built student schemes – and sometimes for completely different land uses – from industrial and logistics, to film studios and data centres. Meanwhile our retail work keeps proliferating, underpinned by our ongoing relationships with Marks & Spencer in England and Home Bargains in Scotland.

The biggest changes at Iceni this year come down to a few themes. Our public sector work has grown, from Strategic Development Area growth plans to the Southport Pier funding bid and Edinburgh’s newly adopted Princes Street and Waverley Valley heritage strategy. Our multidisciplinary appointments have shot up too – Landscape and Heritage & Townscape especially – and our regional footprint keeps expanding, not least in Manchester. Our strategic infrastructure and DCO-scale work has grown across virtually every discipline, and our strategic land promotion pipeline continues to mature, including some sites we’ve held since before Iceni itself was founded in 2005. Patience, it turns out, remains a planning skill. And our industrial, logistics and data centre workload keeps expanding across the business.

I’m particularly pleased to say that, in our first full year of employee ownership, the business is in the best shape I’ve ever seen it. You won’t find much evidence of it in photographs (internal governance is notoriously hard to make look interesting), but the changes behind the scenes have mattered just as much as the projects themselves: a new executive structure, greater devolved authority, our new Employee Council, and continued investment in career development. Iceni will keep being owned by our people, for our people, while we carry on delivering for our clients.

Before I sign off, I can’t let this year pass without remembering Fred Peters, one of Iceni’s founding fathers, who passed away in April – shockingly not so long after he’d finally hung up his dayglo transport coat. He’ll be sorely missed. And he’ll never be forgotten. On page 45 of the Yearbook, his close friend and former business partner, Rob Amey, reflects on his legacy.

You can read the full Yearbook, with all the detail behind these themes, here.