Hodder has brought style and rigour to a building type - pools and leisure centres - that usually escapes serious design attention altogether. He has also recently completed another aqueous centre, at Darlaston outside Walsall. This is the third of a triumvirate of fine new civic buildings in the borough by the new generation of modernists. After the austere tower of the New Art Gallery by Caruso St. John and the floating pierced oval disc of the town’s new bus station by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, Hodder has contributed a rolling wave of a building for the new pools. What other provincial borough in the country can boast such a roster of happening architectural talent?

Hodder escaped typecasting with his second big competition win, soon after Colne. St. Catherine's College, Oxford - an immaculate early 1960s modernist classic by the Danish architect Arne Jacobsen - wanted to build a residential extension. The cream of London's emerging young modernists fought to win it, literally: at one point two of them even came to blows at a party, both claiming to have won. Unbeknown to them all, the winner turned out to be the quiet man from Manchester. It was 1995 and Hodder was now a force to be reckoned with. He drew from Jacobsen without aping him, producing a calm, intelligent sequence of linked pavilions for the new student rooms. He has now been invited back by the college to design a bigger second phase.

When he won the inaugural Stirling Prize in 1996, however, it was not for Oxford but for another university building back on his home ground. The confidently sculpted Centenary Building at the University of Salford, with its tough industrial aesthetic, was designed and built in double-quick time, making its own context in what was then a wrecked urban landscape. As unlike collegiate Oxford as it is possible to imagine, the Centenary Building demonstrated that the new universities could make a physical impact with landmark architecture. It helped to put Manchester’s twin city back on the map.

And Hodder’s luck held. Winning the competition for the Clissold Leisure Centre in Hackney gave him what all British architects need: a high-profile job in the capital. It is being followed by another project in the borough, for a big new library and museum (officially designated a “Technology Learning Centre”) right on the town hall square. Like Salford and Walsall, Hackney needs all the help it can get and such new user-friendly civic buildings will help its cause considerably.