King Edward Memorial Park, Tower Hamlets, during construction © Patricia Rayner for Tideway
WHAT MADE YOU WANT TO BECOME AN ARCHITECT?
My father was an architect in private practice, so there was always conversation about buildings, spaces and materials from an early age. This had an impact and encouraged my own path to becoming an architect.
ASK THE ARCHITECT
Jennifer Dixon, director at Fereday Pollard, speaks to ADF about her love for the profession, and why architects must better articulate the value they bring in order to grow their presence in projects.
WWW.ARCHITECTSDATAFILE.CO.UK
WHAT DO YOU LIKE MOST ABOUT THE JOB? The breadth of the subject has kept me interested my whole career. In any one day I’m dealing with design content, technical subject matter, law, human factors, heritage, social/environmental science, and of course business growth and development. There are deep specialists in the profession, but overall to get projects designed and delivered it’s a polymathematical pursuit, and always interesting.
WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST CHALLENGE AS A PRACTICE DIRECTOR?
Our practice is going through a period of scaling and growth, which comes with its challenges but is also exceptionally exciting. My multidisciplinary background and experience across a wide range of clients and projects in the transportation and infrastructure sectors have allowed me to bring focused direction and strategic insight to support the practice’s growth, its projects and its clients. The
next big challenge is to explore how our unique specialisms can be useful beyond the UK, where we have worked almost exclusively for 30 years – I’m certain that our experience in crafting the human and environmental interface with civil infrastructure interventions will be of value in countries where new infrastructure has the potential to impact negatively on both urban and rural settings and communities. Our fi rst overseas venture, which a project to support the Ostlig Ringvej tunnel construction in Copenhagen, is the start of this growth journey.
COULD YOU DESCRIBE THE DIFFERENT PARAMETERS OF YOUR ROLE WITHIN FEREDAY POLLARD, AND HOW MUCH DESIGN WORK YOU ARE ABLE TO DO? In my ‘practice director’ capacity I spend my time identifying opportunities, winning work, creating the conditions for others to do their best design work and supporting them to do so. In my capacity as a ‘fee earner,’ I practice as an RIBA Client Adviser, the defi nition of which is ‘a designer who doesn’t design’ – I use my design experience to support client teams to understand stakeholders’ needs, write design briefs, devise schedules of services for design teams and review design outputs. In short, I write the design ‘question’ rather than creating the design ‘answer.’
ADF FEBRUARY 2026
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