It would not be much of an exaggeration to brand Guy Hollaway 'the man who built Kent' given the number of iconic buildings his studio has created across the county.

With his long-awaited multi-storey skate park F51 just opening in Folkestone this month, we sent reporter Rhys Griffiths to find out what drives him to continue to transform our towns and cities.

For more than an hour Guy Hollaway sets out his philosophy in precise, carefully-chosen words.

This is clearly a man who takes his work incredibly seriously indeed, and to talk with him on the subject of architecture is to feel intellectually stimulated.

At his studio in Hythe, he sets out his vision for what his work can contribute to the county where he grew up and where he believes coastal communities in particular are undergoing a transformation unlike anything in a century or more.

"I personally think that we are now going through a coastal renaissance that we haven't seen since the Victorian and Edwardian era," he says.

"What we're now seeing is this amazing time where there is investment that I haven't seen in the same way, and a post-pandemic society where you can monetize from home or you've got greater flexibility of where you can work, so you can actually live where you want to live.

"And what a great place to live, and enjoy everything that this brings in terms of environment and the beach and the sea, and culture, food, sport or recreation.

"Now you can actually have your work here as well because your work is completely mobile, and if you need to go to London you can get on the high-speed train and you can be there in less than an hour. That's an extraordinarily powerful thing."

After growing up in Herne Bay, Hollaway left Kent to study at university in Brighton, before graduating into a recession which meant opportunities for young architects were thin on the ground.

Handily a family friend, Nigel Thorpe, ran the firm Cheney and Thorpe Architects at the Tramway Stables in Hythe and - in return for board and lodgings - the newly-qualified youngster was offered a job working for free.

The foot in the door was all he needed, and soon he had risen through the ranks and bought out the business, which was later renamed Guy Hollaway Architects.

"If we invest in the next generation, then we think that it will come back in spades..."

Nowhere is the legacy of the firm more evident than a few miles along the coast in Folkestone, where a long-standing relationship with billionaire philanthropist Sir Roger De Haan has seen Hollaway produce a series of buildings which have proved central to the town's ongoing regeneration.

"I feel like I've been very fortunate to be part of his regeneration plan," he says of De Haan and his charitable trust's ongoing investment in the community.

"That plan is about creating a fantastic town to live in. If we can create a really meaningful place then and we can invest in the town, invest in the people who live in the town, and really have a focus on investing in young people, then we can create what we call 'generational regeneration'.

"If we invest in the next generation, then we think that it will come back in spades.

"If young people can see opportunity to create a career in a community that they're invested in, then they are more likely to stay and they're more likely to contribute and that's a really powerful message."

One of the first major projects the studio worked on in the town was the seafront restaurant perched on the edge of the harbour which would go on to become Rocksalt.

Its role as a 'destination' dining room, alongside the flourishing arts scene in the Creative Quarter, was pivotal to what could be considered the first wave of De Haan's overall vision for the transformation of the town.

I ask Hollaway what he thought of the criticism, levelled from some quarters of the community, that a restaurant like this did nothing for those locals struggling to make ends meet in one of the county's most deprived wards.

"I grew up not having huge amount of money," he said, "I understood that.

"So when I was designing Rocksalt I consciously designed the best seats in the house outside of the building. So when you come up to the entrance you go round the corner and those steps turn into these seats looking out over the inner harbour.

"The idea of that was that you could go and pick up fish and chips, sit on those steps in the sun, watch the fishermen bring in the fish, and have the best seats in the house even if you couldn't afford to be in the restaurant at that point.

"So it's a kind of aspirational, entry level idea. I think it's really important to try and make a building feel very accessible and aspirational at the same time.

"Every time when I go down there, if I have got time, I walk around to check that somebody's sitting there and more times than not there's somebody sitting there eating fish and chips and I think 'wow, that's working'."

Accessibility and aspiration also appear guiding principles for the new £17 million F51 skate park in Tontine Street, which he describes as "a gift from Sir Roger to the town".

A stunning building which houses climbing, bouldering and boxing facilities alongside three floors for skating and BMX riding, the design brief was to come up with a venue which could host everyone from children taking their first lessons right through to Olympians preparing to go for gold in elite competition.

"It's a gift to these young people which he's incredibly proud of," he says.

"This skate park needs to be accessible from the beginner right the way through to the skating pro. It needs to be challenging for everyone.

"That's an extraordinary brief to try and achieve, and then if you think it's complicated enough then we decided to stick the concrete bowl up in the air, so you can go underneath it and you can hear the skateboards above you.

"Then the whole building cantilevers out. This is a big building and it gets bigger. It looks from the outside a lot smaller than it is and it's not until you venture inside that you start to understand the scale of the building."

"Then we put the whole building on stills. It's like building in Venice..."

Other projects in Folkestone have included the Three Hills sports park in Cheriton Road, the Primary Academy, the harbour fountains and of course Rocksalt.

But the mark of the Hollaway studio can be seen in many other locations across Kent. In Ashford - on opposite sides of the railway tracks - stand the Elwick Place cinema complex and the Curious Brewery.

Meanwhile in Canterbury the firm has produced the Hampton by Hilton hotel built on the site of the former Slatters Hotel in St Margaret's Street, and in Margate the studio worked on the masterplanning of the revived Dreamland and the restoration of the Scenic Railway.

But it is the planned headquarters for bicycle manufacturer Brompton, which will be built in the heart of Ashford, that is really firing Hollaway up.

"I've been in competition with Manchester and Birmingham," he said.

"I was up against some really stiff competition and up against two cities which have cycling at the heart of them.

"But we what we did was we managed to find site that was in a hundred acres and in green space in the town centre, which is unheard of, but it happens to be in the flood plain.

"So we've had to come up with an amazing design solution to enhance the flood plain, turn that into a benefit, then we put the whole building on stills. It's like building in Venice.

"Within 10 years, if everything goes to plan and we complete all the phases, we will have created between 2,500 and 3,000 jobs on that one site, but not only that, we have created architecture that can rewild 100 acres so it's in parkland."

And what of his philosophy and, if it's not too grandiose a concept, his legacy?

"If you understand the whole, then you can think about the individual," he says. "So if I understand the whole of Folkestone then I can start to feed in and understand how to react to individual buildings or what the sum of the whole would be.

"I'd far rather be invested in where I live because that comes with a responsibility. I don't want to leave something behind that I'm not proud of, that I won't want to go back to in 10, 15, 20 years' time.

"I want to go back and know we made the right decisions at the right time. There's a responsibility for me to be doing something I believe in and is something good for the community and will create greater prosperity or better place to live or will help the town economically or whatever.

"So I feel a huge responsibility to that."