Sarah Murray

As a leader in her field, Sarah is passionate about creating special places. Combining over 15 years’ experience in masterplanning and architecture across a range of scales, and with extensive travels and scrutiny of places around the world, she is motivated to enhance the quality of placemaking in the UK with fresh and forward-thinking ideas – making ‘different’ great!

One of Sarah’s key strengths is turning ideas into reality, ensuring that even early-stage visions are deliverable. She believes that building strong, approachable, and trusting relationships with clients (and collaborators), with a “can do” attitude and a sensitivity to viability and practicality, is paramount to successful projects. Sarah’s architectural background and natural aptitude for resolving problems ensures a design approach that embraces rigour and structure at all stages of the design process, whilst never losing focus on the bigger picture and complexities of projects at all scales. 

Sarah believes in designing high-quality, sustainable developments with a strong focus on landscape-led design and community engagement to create a legacy for future generations. She believes that prioritising a sites’ natural assets is key to maximising the potential development opportunity. Site constraints have the ability to pave the way for opportunities that will shape a proposal ensuring that it naturally forms an extension or addition to its existing context. In addition, “getting under the skin” of locals as part of community engagement is vital to have an in depth understanding of a place.

Throughout her career to date, Sarah has taken the lead in the design, coordination, and delivery of numerous strategic residential and mixed-use projects, ranging from 1 to 10,000 units. This includes new settlements and urban extensions across the UK, an award-winning regeneration project in the Midlands, successful appeals as well as a number of projects in northern Europe and Australia. With her eagerness to educate the next generation of Urban Designers, Sarah has also forged strong links with Oxford Brookes University, offering support and advice to students at both Batchelor and Masters level through guest lecturing and 1:1 mentoring.

As co-founder of edge Urban Design alongside Hannah Smart, Sarah is resolved to continually bringing a new Urban Design and masterplanning offer to the market. As a trailblazer in the industry, Sarah’s curiosity, enthusiasm and “why not” approach to everything she does has already amassed a diverse portfolio of development opportunities. Hannah and Sarah are highly skilled and respected in the master planning profession, having delivered between them planning permissions for in excess of 50,000 new homes across the UK throughout their careers.