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Peter Ackroyd is made an RIBA Honorary Fellow because of his deep understanding of the relationships between history and place, between buildings and people. He has explored these in a series of literary works, fictional and biographical which have led readers (and increasingly viewers of his television explorations) to a greater understanding of the world. Overtly or not, his theme has generally been London but his musings on the place of his birth always have universal application.

Peter is the author of thirteen novels, numerous biographies and works of historical non-fiction and has presented several television programmes, among them Peter Ackroyd’s London. He is currently Honorary President of the London Festival of Architecture committee and chief book reviewer for The Times.

Ackroyd studied at Yale University and went on to act as Literary Editor of The Spectator (1973-7) and Joint Managing Editor (1978-81). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded a CBE in 2003. Equally acclaimed for both his inventive biographies and his diverse fiction, Ackroyd blends past and present, fact and fiction in his writing, much of which revolves around the city of London, evoked as both a powerful physical presence and as a sinister metaphor, haunted and animated by its past and its characters, both real and imaginary. He has been the recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award, the Guardian fiction prize and the Whitbread Biography Award.

Ackroyd’s first novel, The Great Fire of London (1982), is a reworking of Dickens' Little Dorrit. The book set a formal pattern for many of his later novels, including Hawksmoor (1985) and The House of Doctor Dee (1993), by intertwining historical segments with present-day narratives. His other novels include First Light (1989), an original distillation of English landscape and history, and The House of Doctor Dee (1993), which epitomises Ackroyd's fascination for the sense of history and place which lurk in the hidden corners of London. London: The Biography (2000) is a history of the city that has exerted such a powerful influence on his writing, and was awarded the South Bank Show Annual Award for Literature. His latest book about London is Thames: Sacred River (2007).

Stephen Bayley is a man for whom design in all its manifestations really matters. Almost obsessively and in a wide variety of ways he has sought to interest the public in his subject and succeeded. Britain in 2008 is a very different place from the way it looked in the 1980s and that is due in no small measure to Stephen.

In 1981 he was invited by Sir Terence Conran to run the Boilerhouse Project in a dilapidated basement at the V&A, where he put on 20 exhibitions in five years on subjects as diverse as the Ford Motor Company, Sony, Issey Miyake and Coca Cola. In 1987 the Boilerhouse transmuted into the Design Museum in a new home at Butler’s Wharf with Stephen as its first and most controversial and innovative director. In 1989 he was made a Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France's top artistic honour. Since 1990, he has worked as a freelance design consultant, advising numerous global brands including Absolut Vodka, Marks & Spencer and Foster and Partners.

In the late 1990s he brought his strong design ideas to bear on the Millennium Dome project (before their watering down into the patronising final delivered version). He resigned the role in 1998 citing ministerial interference, saying of the Dome that: 'it could turn out to be crap'.

As Architecture and Design Correspondent for The Observer since 2006 Stephen Bayley has shown a once largely design-illiterate public that design can improve their lives in so many ways. He has a zeal for the subject which recalls that of Leslie Martin, Robin and Lucienne Day and the other progenitors of the Festival of Britain. Tom Wolfe said of him 'I don't know anybody with more interesting observations about style, taste and contemporary design.'

He is the author of eight books including The Unbearable Redundancy of Things, Life’s A Pitch and Work: The Building of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, 30 exhibition catalogues and countless articles, many of which treat his subjects with admirable and refreshing scepticism. His first column in the Observer on succeeding Deyan Sudjic in the role of architecture critic, was typically outspoken: ‘Like oil painting, opera and rock, design has a beginning and, like them, may be nearing its historic end. Meanwhile, we are left with the 'designer', his vanities and his postures. I look around at urban squalor and civic mess and appreciate that the task of world improvement through better design is not yet complete.’ Architecture and design need such forthright friends and the RIBA is pleased to welcome him as an honorary and we hope continuingly difficult fellow.

Loren Butt is a mechanical engineer and proud to be so called. He has developed a reputation for being an inventive and strategic thinker, committed to achieving architectural design intent. Not for him the fashionable Environmental Engineer tag, though that is the job he has been doing supremely well for 20 years. Like many of the best engineers, he has worked relatively quietly in the background of any number of projects, not just making them work environmentally and economically, but also effective in terms of lifetime performance and not just for the time it takes to make the headlines and collect the awards.

After working for various services engineering companies, both in the UK and Canada, Butt joined Foster Associates as an Engineering Director. He contributed to the ground-breaking formative work of the practice, most notably the Willis Faber & Dumas Headquarters and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, but also, among others, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, Stansted Airport and the Sackler Galleries at the Royal Academy of Arts. Butt’s involvement in these and other projects ensured that a strategy was developed in parallel with the architectural vision from the earliest stages of design. His memories of his former boss are however mixed. He and his wife Jenny are keen gardeners and restored the listed 19th century palm house in the grounds of their Hampshire house and remember well the occasion on which Norman landed his helicopter on their lawn and blew away the runner beans.

Since 1987 Butt has had worked as an independent consultant to a number of architectural practices, by whom he is consulted on conceptual services strategies at the early stages of design development. He has contributed to a great variety of projects, including the Tate Britain Pier, British Airways London Eye, London Underground Jubilee Line Stratford Depot, White Cliffs Visitor Centre in Dover, HM British Embassy in Moscow and the Brussels Opera House in La Monnaie.

David Fisk is the thinking man's engineer and the thinking engineer's man. Fisk was one of the first to make the now obvious connection between engineering and the sustainable performance of buildings. As one of the key scientific advisors to government he has had a beneficial influence on government policy in the areas of climate change, energy use, regional policy and transport. He has also done much to persuade all involved in the governance of our resources as well as in the construction industry that all future development has to be sustainable.

David is the Royal Academy of Engineering Chair at Imperial College in Engineering for Sustainable Development. He is also co-Director of their Urban Energy Systems project. He was previously Chief Scientist and Policy Director in the Department of Energy, the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions and Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions. Until 2005 he was Chief Scientific Adviser to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Responsibilities included UK Climate Change policy, including the Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change, the Framework Convention and its Kyoto Protocol, the UK's first National Air Quality Strategy and policy on the disposal of radioactive and other wastes.

Fisk has published writing in the fields of engineering, environment modelling and analysis, energy and resource economics, knowledge management and risk. His research interests include approaches to understanding the onset of unsustainable development and how this might be best included in risk assessments, particularly for large complex systems such as cities.

Fisk was made a Companion of the Bath in the 1999 New Years Honours list.

Michael Ingall has consistently shown himself to be a developer deeply concerned with architectural, urban, social and environmental issues. He has demonstrated that development is about the regeneration of our cities as much as it is about the making of money. An unsung role model for other developers, he has been recognised in the 2008 Stirling shortlist with the Manchester Civil Justice Centre, a highly sustainable development which was also shortlisted for the RIBA English Partnerships Award.

Ingall started his career at Drivers Jonas, managing several large estates, and went on to become a Director of Surveyors at Molyneux Rose, where he specialised in investment and development consultancy. He was then Property Director at Raglan Properties plc, where between 1990 and 1995 he was responsible for restructuring this company.

Throughout his career, but particularly as Chief Executive of Allied London Properties (ALP) since the year 2000, Ingall has encouraged the use of distinguished architects, including Foster + Partners, Sheppard Robson, Make, McAslan & Partners, and Denton Corker Marshall, and led the development of major mixed-use, inner urban projects in Glasgow, London, Manchester and elsewhere.

ALP’s Spinningfields regeneration scheme in Manchester demonstrates how ingenuity in development can be profitable while providing for an active, diverse community and incorporating major new civic buildings like Denton Corker Marshall’s innovative Civil Justice Centre in Manchester.. ALP’s restoration and revitalisation of the Brunswick Centre in London is an outstanding example of sensitive design-led regeneration of a key, innovative urban intervention of the late ’60s.

Current schemes in the ALP portfolio, such as the regeneration of the Bracknell town centre and the Granada Left Bank development in Manchester (an extension of Spinningfields) show that Ingall and the company he heads have lost none of their imagination and determination to seek high quality in architecture and urban design.

Doreen Lawrence's connection with architecture is both intimate and tragic, but out of the tragedy she has created an inspiring resource to make the study of architecture more accessible. Her son Stephen, who aspired to become an architect, was murdered in a racist attack in 1993 when he was 18 years old and the perpetrators, whilst known, were never convicted. Not only did Doreen and Neville Lawrence display extraordinary strength and determination in their response to the loss of their son, Doreen went on to found the Stephen Lawrence Trust, which she directs.

Stephen dreamed of becoming an architect so that he could influence the design of inner cities from within. The Stephen Lawrence Trust seeks to make his dreams a reality for others by opening up the architectural and related professions to Britain's most disadvantaged young people. The Trust does its work by awarding bursaries to young people who want to train as architects or construction specialists, by liaising between schools and construction companies, presenting to schools and educational institutions, and by working with the government to find new ways to build communities with self-respect, and to regenerate urban areas.

The opening of the Stephen Lawrence Centre in 2007 was intended to create a welcome, permanent home for the Trust and provide much-needed mentoring, education, creative and business development facilities for disaffected young people.

Since its inception, the Trust has become a major force in education, with wide-ranging links to government and educational bodies, but also to the businesses that benefit from the skills developed as a result. The Trust's annual memorial lecture is now in its seventh year, and has been delivered by speakers such as HRH the Prince of Wales, Lord Richard Rogers, Michael Mansfield QC, David Lammy and Maya Angelou. The Trust has awarded 50 undergraduate and postgraduate bursaries to architectural students in the UK, Caribbean and South Africa, as well as three full scholarships to Architectural Association students. With the support of the Marco Goldschmied Foundation, it has also established the Stephen Lawrence Prize for Architecture, now in its 11th year, which is awarded annually at the Stirling Prize Dinner for projects under £1million.

Laura Lee is another of those whose association with architecture came through the misfortune of others. As a cancer care nurse one of her patients was Charles Jencks's wife Maggie. Laura promised she would carry out Maggie's dying wish: to see cancer sufferers and their families and friends offered humane facilities in which they could learn about the illness and receive support. Neither woman could have dreamt that within 12 years from Richard Murphy's first centre opening at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh, that a series of six centres would be open, with a further three under construction and four more planned. All of their services are free of charge.

Maggie’s Centres are positioned close to major cancer treatment centres so that they are easy to access. As CEO Lee engages whole-heartedly with the concept of the centres and conveys her enthusiasm to their associated design teams. She deals with all the issues of fundraising, running the centres and persuading architect-led teams to produce great projects.

Opened in 2006, Maggie’s Fife in Kirkcaldy was designed by Zaha Hadid, her first UK-based building. The building has a sculptural, sparkling black exterior with sharp angles, contrasting with a light-filled interior of welcoming curves. Zaha said of her design: “It’s a great honour to create a building that will enhance the experience of people visiting the Maggie’s Centre in Fife. I knew Maggie and we shared an understanding of how significantly environments can help enhance personal wellbeing.”

Further centres are planned for Nottingham (CZWG Architects), Newcastle ( Foreign Office Architects), Cheltenham ( MacCormac Jamieson Prichard), Monklands Hospital Lanarkshire ( Reiach and Hall) and South Wales (Kisho Kurokawa - his last work). Other existing centres include Dundee (Frank Gehry), Inverness (David Page, Page & Park), Edinburgh (Richard Murphy Architects) and London (Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners and landscaping by Dan Pearson).

Duncan Michael is rewarded with Honorary Fellowship of the RIBA because of his tireless efforts to help improve our built environment through a number of different avenues. The third in a triumvirate of engineers in this year’s list of RIBA Honorary Fellows, the affably eccentric Highland Scot Michael has placed his vast experience as a teacher and practitioner with Arup at the disposal of a number of charitable construction industry causes through the Arup Foundation.

Michael studied Engineering at Edinburgh University and later became a lecturer at Leeds University, where he also completed a PhD. He was chairman of Arup from 1995-2000, expanding the organisation into a global company, and became Chairman of the Trustees for Arup's Ownership from 1995 to 2004. He remains a Trustee of the Ove Arup Charitable Foundation and continues to serve the company. Through his Chairmanship Michael modernised Arup’s constitution, governance and management, enabling it to prosper without abandoning its social values.

Michael has been very involved in establishing, through the Arup Foundation, programmes run at the LSE (Cities Programme) and Cambridge (Interdisciplinary Design for the Built Environment). He also has a distinguished public service career, advising many universities and professional institutions. Currently his main focus is on the delivery of a massive social housing programme in England as Chairman of Investment at the Housing Corporation, creating over 40,000 new homes annually.

Jonathan Porritt is a man of passion, conviction and eloquence. His is also in possession of a media-savviness that has enabled him to use those qualities successfully to argue the green case long before it became fashionable. For seven years (it seems far longer) he was associated by the media with his pressure group, Friends of the Earth, as saints are associated with the place of their birth. Since then and with equal impact he has been re-dubbed Jonathan Porritt of the Green Party and of Forum for the Future.

Porritt was formerly chair of the UK Ecology Party (now the Green Party) from 1978 to 1984, during which time he gave the party credibility with the electorate, and helped the party membership grew from a few hundred to around 3,000. In 1984 he became Director of Friends of the Earth, a post he held until the turn of the decade. FoE was the first organisation to campaign effectively on the issues of climate change and biodiversity.

After the Greens achieved 15% of the European Parliamentary vote in 1989, he became a strong public advocate of change in the Green Party urging it to become a more professionally run organisation. He remains an active member of the party. Between 1993 and 1996 he was Chairman of UNED-UK and has also been Chairman of Sustainability South West, the regional Round Table for Sustainable Development (1999-2001) and a Trustee of WWF UK (1991-2005).

Porritt is currently co-founder and Programme Director of Forum for the Future, Chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission and is an eminent writer, broadcaster and commentator on sustainable development. Established in 1996, Forum for the Future is the UK's leading sustainable development charity, with over one hundred partner organisations, including some of the world's leading companies. Porritt was appointed by the Prime Minister as Chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission in 2000, the Government's principal source of independent advice across the whole sustainable development agenda. In addition, he has been a member of the Board of the South West Regional Development Agency since 1999 and is Co-Director of The Prince of Wales's Business and Environment Programme which runs seminars in Cambridge, Salzburg, South Africa and the USA.

Allain Provost is the grand-papa of French landscape architecture, whose strongly geometrical work and his benign influence can be seen on both sides of the Channel (not least where the Tunnel emerges near Calais). But it was with his designs for the Parc André Citroën in Paris that he began to rescue his profession and re-establish landscape architecture as much more than an adjunct to architecture and the rationalisation of garden design.

Provost’s work includes designs for Parc André Citroën in Paris, Courneuve Park in Paris, the Eurotunnel in Calais, the Technocentre Renault, Guyancourt, the reconstruction of the castle gardens of Villarceaux and the Thames Barrier Park, London. He was also a jury member on the Father Collins Park design competition in Dublin in 2003. He established the Groupe Signe in 1990 with another landscape architect Alain Cousseran.

Working with architects Patel Taylor, his designs for London’s Thames Barrier Park (an RIBA Award winner in 1999) were a welcome addition to the capital's range of landscape architecture projects. The park has a fresh modern look with adventurous planting and a dancing water fountain. In plan, the design has a distinct resemblance to Provost's competition-winning scheme for Parc Citroen in Paris. Both plans are dominated by a diagonal line slicing a rectangle. This geometrical idea is found in many of his landscape designs. In 2006 Patel Taylor with Allain Provost were announced as the winning design team from a field of six international practices to take forward the creation of Birmingham’s first new City Park for over a century.
The park design is composed of three interconnected gardens forming a centrepiece to Eastside and connecting it to the core of the city.

Provost is an Honorary Member of the French Federation of Landscape Architecture (Fédération Française du Paysage - FFP)

Andrew Scoones has done more to drive cross-professional collaboration and to engender respect between the differing disciplines within the construction industry than any other. In the past 20 years he has turned the Building Centre Trust, of which he is now Director, from a place where architects would sneak in only to see the latest bricks, to a thriving industry community centre where architects are only too happy to breakfast with engineers and construction professionals discussing the latest thinking in environmental design.

The Building Centre Trust was established in 1963 as an independent, charitable organisation to provide support for educational, research and cultural activities connected with the built environment. For the first ten years of his employment there Scoones ran the educational film unit, producing over 50 films for the construction industry. Since then, he has developed the Trust's series of educational initiatives. These include the Art of the Structural Engineer, Renewable Energy in the Built Environment, Digital Fabricators, the Engineering Club, the Store Street series with Peter Cook, and the Prefabulous Homes series and publication.

He has also co-curated and directed numerous exhibitions at The Building Centre as well as exhibitions at Earls Court and the NEC, Birmingham. Most recently he has collaborated with the London Mayor’s Office to produce the travelling exhibition No 1 Lower Carbon Drive, an exhibition offering advice on how to transform a typical Victorian terrace into an environmentally friendly home. This debuted in Trafalgar Square in 2007 and has since travelled to the Ideal Home Show and Grand Designs Live.

His contribution to the discourse about our built environment has been tireless, enthusiastic and enormous. The Building Centre has become a meeting place for architects and engineers and many others with an interest in how we shape our environment.

Chicago born Professor Richard Sennett is honoured by the RIBA for his profound thinking and teaching on the development of our cities. He is a part of a long and honourable line of scholars stretching back via Lewis Mumford to Ebeneezer Howard. Sennett's work has provided the sociological basis for the work of architects and urbanists for four decades.

He is Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Bemis Professor of Social Sciences at MIT. At LSE he teaches in the Cities Programme and trains doctoral students in the sociology of culture.

Sennett’s scholarly writing centres on the development of cities, the nature of work in modern society and the sociology of culture and his most recent books include The Craftsman (2008) and The Culture of the New Capitalism, (2006). He is currently working on two large projects, the first about cultural materialism, and the second a large-scale over-view of urban design, a look at the evolution of cities which Lewis Mumford traced in The City in History.

Sennett originally trained in music but when a hand injury put an end to his musical career he entered academic life, training at Harvard. His intellectual life as an urbanist came into focus during the time he spent as a fellow of the Joint Centre for Urban Studies of Harvard and MIT.

Sennett founded, and directed for a decade, the New York Institute of the Humanities at New York University. He then chaired a United Nations commission on urban development and design. As president of the American Council on Work he led a forum for researchers trying to understand the changing pattern of American labour. He has been awarded the Amalfi and the Ebert Prizes for Sociology, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of the Arts. He has written for, amongst others, the Guardian, New Statesman, History Today, British Journal of Sociology, Contemporary Sociology, New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, New Yorker and Harpers.

It is rare for an artist to influence directly the progress of architecture. The work of James Turrell is an outstanding example of this unusual circumstance and for this reason the RIBA is honouring him.

As a sculptor Turrell works directly with light and the impact it has on the perception of space. His installations can be seen throughout the world and have moved even the harshest critics to wonder at the beauty and simplicity of his work. The result has been to raise the critical sensibility of the observer, and in particular of architects, in relation to the mysterious beauty of light and how it is perceived through the eye. Architecture only exists through the perception and illusions of light and Turrell’s work serves as a rousing challenge to the inventive possibilities of creating poetic space.

As a child Turrell was invited to ‘go inside and greet the light’ at Quaker meetings. Subsequently he learned to fly at the age of 16 and explored the perception of vision both through the experience of flying and with his studies on perceptual psychology and art. Inspiration then came from the work of Mark Rothko, Turrell preferring to see the paintings in the form of transparencies where light is an active ingredient. An important exhibition in Berlin in 2001 was appropriately titled ‘On the Sublime: Mark Rothko, Yves Klein, James Turrell.’

Apart from his extraordinary ‘Roden Crater’ project, Turrell has worked at many scales including installations at the Yorkshire sculpture park and an unbuilt installation for the Thames. The work has mystical overtones but is firmly rooted in the reality of experience. It is preoccupied with how the eye responds to dramatic changes of light level and the actual nature of the moment of looking.

The Dutch artist Madelon Vriesendorp has made a unique contribution to the visual culture of architecture, sometimes challenging architects, sometimes beautifying their work. Born in Holland and now based in London, she studied at the Rietveld Academy Amsterdam in the 1960s. She later worked on the restoration of old frescoes and as a designer of stage costumes, books and jewellery. Five years later she enrolled at Central St Martin’s in London and after graduating moved to New York, where she co-founded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture with husband Rem Koolhaas.

Paintings Vriesendorp produced at the time were used for book and magazine covers, and were exhibited at the New York Guggenheim and Max Protatch galleries, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, Berlin's Aedes Gallery and the Gallery Ma in Tokyo. Her paintings and drawings from this period were published in Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York in 1978 and were widely acknowledged as beguiling and beautiful masterpieces. From the mid 1980s she taught art and design at a number of schools, including the Architectural Association and the Edinburgh School of Art.

Over the last ten years Vriesendorp has worked in collaboration with Charles Jencks, producing drawings and models to accompany many of his publications, and with her daughter on several books and art projects. Most recently she has produced illustrations for Built, Domus and Abitare, while working on costumes, built objects, paintings and short stories. In 2008 the Architectural Association hosted a show titled The World of Madelon Vriesendorp, and published an accompanying book of the same title, with contributions from Beatriz Columina, Douglas Coupland, Charles Jencks, Shumon Basar and Stephan Truby.