Award-winning Plymouth architecture firm appoints liquidators

Award-winning Plymouth architecture company ADG has appointed liquidators. The Millbay-based company, which designed some of the city's most famous buildings over the past four decades, has ceased trading and will be wound up voluntarily.

ADG has been responsible for designing many key buildings including City College Plymouth’s £13m STEM Centre, the Hoe’s Azure apartment block, the Peninsula Dental School at Derriford, and Plymouth Fish Market. But today it was announced that insolvency practitioners at Plymouth’s Brailey Hicks had been appointed as liquidators.

At a general meeting on Wednesday this week it was resolved that ADG Consultancy Ltd be wound up voluntarily. This followed meetings with shareholders and creditors last month.

Earlier this month PlymouthLive reported that the architecture firm, which operated from Studio 5-11 at Millbay, had ceased trading and staff were sent home. Directors said the company had become financially unviable and blamed the slowdown in the construction industry, plus inflation and increased regulation.

ADG was founded, as Architects Design Group, by Marc Nash, Phil Burgess and Ian Potts in 1985. They had all studied together at Plymouth School of Architecture more than a decade earlier before working for different architectural firms.

The business was based in a basement beneath a flat in North Hill, but after four years moved into a redundant church in Hotham Place, Millbridge, which was converted into offices. After 15 years the company moved to a larger space at Tamar Science Park, but in 2008 relocated to the top floor of the former Social Security building known as Durley House, in Millbay. The 1970s structure was stripped back and the building was turned into modern offices, renamed Studio 5-11, and tenants included PlymouthLive from 2013 to 2021. Other companies operate from the building today.

ADG was involved in more than 3,000 projects and designed many of Plymouth’s, and the region’s, most eye-catching buildings. In addition to those already mentioned, its architects designed the Sherwell Centre, at North Hill; Plymouth Foyer, in Stonehouse; Berkeley Square in the city centre; the Gaia Spa at Boringdon Hall Hotel, and the recently built Harbour Arch Quay block of flats at Sutton Harbour. ADG was involved in delivery of the master plan for the regeneration of the Mount Wise naval base into homes.

Elsewhere in the South West, ADG has worked on Padstow’s Waterfront, including Rick Stein’s Cookery School and St Petroc’s Hotel, and RYA Portland House, the training and accommodation facility built for the GB sailing squad competing in the London 2012 Olympic Games.

The company won numerous awards including several Abercrombie Design Awards and honours from RIBA - and The Herald Business Award for green business of the year in 2012.

By 2015 ADG was turning over £1m a year and employed 21 people. But the three original founders all stepped down as directors several years ago.

Mr Potts left in 2017 and died, aged 66, in 2021. Mr Nash and Mr Burgess both ceased to be directors in 2020. Patrick Deigan and Dale Beeson took over as directors in April 2020, just as the Covid pandemic took hold. .

Earlier this month, Mr Deigan told PlymouthLive the company had faced a reduction in predicted workload due to projects being put on hold and other projects coming to an end. Rising business costs and increased regulation also had an effect and meant the company became financially unviable.

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