“Fundamentally people don’t understand what the built environment is, they don’t understand the components within it and that comes from the fact that it is so fragmented in professions, in education, in professional institutions, all of whom are part of a whole, all of whom fundamentally believe and do all different parts of it but there’s no kind of definition of the built environment, there’s no sort of understanding of what that is so how can you expect young people or politicians or others to engage with this properly when we can’t even define it as one whole.”
Susan Freeman
Hi, I’m Susan Freeman. Welcome back to our PropertyShe podcast series brought to you by Mishcon de Reya in association with the London Real Estate Forum, where I get to interview some of the key influencers in the world of real estate and the built environment. Today, I am absolutely delighted to welcome Nick McKeogh. Hick is the Co-founder and Chief Executive of New London Architecture (NLA) which he established with Peter Murray in 2005. Under his leadership NLA has grown into a prominent hub that fosters dialogue, research and events shaping London’s built environment. Before Co-founding NLA, Nick studied civil and environmental engineering at UCL, then joined his family business Pipers Model Makers in 1996. There he developed an interactive system for the City of London model which became the centre piece of the London stand at MIPIM. Nick has played a key role in creating several public exhibitions and also spearheaded the evolution of the London Architecture Biennale in the annual London Festival of Architecture. Nick is Co-chair of the Opportunity London Partnership, Trustee and Honorary Treasurer of The London Society and a Director of Pipers Model Makers. In recognition of this contributions to UK Architecture he was named an Honorary Fellow of the RIBA in 2002.
So now we’re going to hear from Nick McKeogh about his story, what inspired him to set up NLA and his many ongoing initiatives to promote London and the built environment. Nick, good morning. I am so pleased to have the opportunity to talk to you as you are the driving force behind so many important initiatives. So I think it is about time we heard your story on this podcast.
Nick McKeogh
Well it’s a pleasure to be here and thank you for having me Susan.
Susan Freeman
Well I hope it is a pleasure Nick. So let’s, let’s start with your background. Where did you grow up and did you always intend to join the family business?
Nick McKeogh
Um well I grew up in a place called Claygate which is down in Surrey just outside of London and I guess yes I have a connection to the property industry but one maybe that’s slightly different to most. My father who was a bit of a serial entrepreneur had acquired an architectural model making business just up the road in Kingston in the sort of mid-70’s so I grew up with a father who had a number of businesses but one of which was quite an interesting one and I used to quite like to go up in my school holidays and see models being built and cars and people in miniature and he ran that business through the 80’s where he’d grew, he took it up to London and became probably the sort of preeminent model maker involved in the sort of marketing model which was something that he’d seen done in the States but thought would be a fantastic thing for the London property market to have so he was involved in schemes like Broadgate and Ludgate and London Bridge City in the 80’s and built a model making business that was involved in sort of I guess the boom or the 80’s into the 90’s but actually also part of the bust so that was kind of the next part of the story that led me into it.
Susan Freeman
And I think we, we all remember seeing the model at MIPIM and being a sort of key point of the MIPIM London stand so you I think started engineering and was that in any way inspired by what you’d seen with the model making?
Nick McKeogh
Yeah, so those two things are connected so as I said, having gone through the boom of the 80’s, my father sort of arrived in the 90’s and like a lot of people in the property industry, we arrived at a downturn so he had decided rather than lose his model makers, they are quite a difficult skill set to acquire so you tend to involve model makers in a business and he didn’t want to lose them so he ended up in the early 90’s when he had no work on keeping them employed by building a model of the City of London. His idea being that he could hire out sections of that model for planning applications and therefore if he got the planning model he could get the marketing model. As it happened, once he’d built that model of the City of London a couple of people took note; one was Michael Cassidy who was just coming in to be policy chair leader of the City of London Corporation and the other was Ricky Burdett, now of LSC City’s fame and Ricky was planning to start the architecture foundation and he saw this model of the City and he’d been talking to Michael Cassidy about how they get higher quality modern architecture into the City so he said would it be possible to use this model to put on an exhibition called ‘City Changes’ and the City of London would back that and they would showcase some of the best new architects and architecture that would happen. I at that time was just finishing my studies. I’d planned to actually go and study English at Warwick University but I hadn’t quite made the grade so I was, had a bit of a forced year out and whilst Warwick said that I could defer my place I would need to defer it so I ended up working, driving a van around London and seeing this model as it was being finalised in 1991 and then helped sort of set it up in an exhibition in the empty Royal Exchange which had just been refurbished and seeing the sort of opening event where Ricky Burdett had gathered Stuart Lipton and Norman Foster and Richard Rogers and various folk that were sort of driving forward and trying to keep things moving I guess in the City at the time and I was kind of in awe you know, instead of just seeing a model making workshop I saw people talking about the future of the City, talking about aspiration. So that kind of inspired me in my year out to think that maybe I don’t want to study English and I went back to see my careers advisor at school and said, ‘I want to study urbanism’ and she had no idea what urbanism was and I sort of explained and she said, ‘well that’s sort of architecture but you can’t do architecture because you didn’t study art so why don’t you do structural engineering or civil engineering because you’ve got maths and physics as well as English in you’re a levels’. So she suggested I go to UCL and study civil engineering which is what I went to do. So that all kind of links in the sense that I was kind of thinking about a career change because of that sort of event of that model going into an exhibition and that exhibition which took place as I said in the Royal Exchange then also triggered a conversation that my father had with Michael Cassidy at the City of London which was ‘okay you want to use this for planning but actually you know, at this time the City is sort of competing internally in London with Canary Wharf, it’s competing with Frankfurt and we should be out selling the City and there’s this new show that’s sort of started up a year or so ago in the South of France and you know why don’t you take this model down and we can sell our wares on the international stage amongst everyone else’. So that, that’s the kind of parallel journey that was happening, my father was in his entrepreneurial way seeing opportunity to, to have a sort of new side of the business by taking that model to Cannes and to MIPIM and I was thinking well actually maybe I’m more interested, I never saw myself as a model maker but I suddenly could see quite an interesting sort of opportunity so as I started University, my first year at University also coincided with the first year we took the model to MIPIM so I did take a little bit of time out, sat in the van and we drove down to Cannes, set up this model and I think there were about 7 or 8 businesses that paid to put a little display up around the model and actually St Martins Property who were developing London Bridge City on the south bank of the Thames, turned out to be a major sponsor although it was the City of London model, they saw the opportunity of sort of promoting that scheme alongside the city opportunities that were shown there and they persuaded all of the members of their project team to sort of take a panel. Obviously all the different parts of the team sort of presented their wares alongside this model of the City and again I was kind of astounded so I had seen this conversation happening in London and we go to a show where there are you know, people from all over the, all over Europe and parts of the world talking about real estate, talking about property development and, and all these different people that were part of the jigsaw standing around this model of London and selling their wares so I, I kind of was hooked at that point on the idea but actually there’s, there’s powerful tool in the model but there’s also this amazing world which I had no real idea of despite the fact my father had had a model making business that existed with all these different skill sets and all these different people working together. So those two things kind of led together and led to me well continuing my studies but ultimately deciding at the end of those studies that a slight to my mother’s horror who thought I would get a sensible job unlike my father you know, in business and, and would become a, a fully qualified civil engineer I actually decided that I would, I would not do that and I would carry on working in the business and think about how we might set up a, a new part of it in, in actually taking that exhibition each year to Cannes and, and sort of evolving that alongside the model making business.
Susan Freeman
And actually you know, hearing you, you talk about it and I remember what an extraordinary place MIPIM was in the early days because you know you’ve mentioned some of these incredible people that were involved in real estate and it was probably the first time that there was an international gathering of those people.
Nick McKeogh
Absolutely and I remember the first few actually whilst Michael Cassidy is as I said, leader of the City and encouraged us to take the model, the City had already signed up to have a joint stand with the London Docklands Development Corporation so this sort of frenemies that were promoting themselves and coming together and, and LDDC, London Docks Development Corporation as it was at the time you know, they were really organised. Their sort of, their comms, the slickness of the presentation was there and the City were sort of part of this stand and looking slightly old fashioned actually but nonetheless Michael Cassidy or one of the City elders had decided that they would sort of commandeer a frigate from the Royal Navy to come in to the bay of Cannes and the City would host this dinner on the frigate and gave away sort of wonderful gifts and, and people were sort of ferried off to that. I wasn’t one of them obviously but that stand was actually separate; my father had taken a separate stand just up the way to do the model and actually as I said, largely sponsored by St Martins Property Group at the time who were developing across the river but the City kept coming over and I think Peter Bennett at the time was the Deputy City Surveyor was very much sort of involved in promotion. My father kept saying, ‘look Peter give us some more brochures of the City because they’ve just, they’re flying off the shelves’ and after he said, ‘well nothing’s happening here, everyone wants to talk to the London Docklands Development Corporation’ so, so there was this sort of amazing scene where you had lots of different you know, international players and yet this kind of tension going on in the sort of different London players. But there is a linked story to that sort of an international point is having done that first show, Peter Rhodes who was quite a famous sales inspector of Reed Midem, and very clear in what he thought was good and what was bad. I remember at the end of the show he came up and he said, he came straight over to my father and he said, ‘well you won’t be coming back here again next year Barry’ and my father said, ‘well what do you mean, we’ve been the most popular stand in the show, no one’s seen a model like this, everyone’s been crowding around you know, this has been incredible’. He said, ‘yes but you know, you’re, you’re cannibalising our revenue because you know people will all want to be on your stand and they won’t buy their own stands’ and up until that point mostly people bought their individual stands so you know, Stanhope had a stand, 12.57 and others and my father said, ‘oh well you know, that’s a surprise to me’ and he said, ‘well I’ll talk to you about getting in, in London but it won’t be happening mark my words’. Sort of dial on a couple of weeks and we’re back in London and a phone call came through and Peter Rhodes said, ‘oh it’s Peter Rhodes you know, Barry would you like to sort of sign for your stand next year’ and my father said, ‘what are you talking about, I thought I wasn’t allowed to come’ and he said, ‘well as it happens you know, I’ve had a call from Paris and Berlin want a bigger stand next to the London model and they’re going to be building their own model so, so therefore you’ve started a trend so I guess we’ll have to see what happens’. So that was kind of what, what started and actually for the first five years or so that we did the London stand, London and Berlin literally every year we kind of compete to have a bigger area down in the bunker and there was a real sort of friendly rivalry between the two cities as we sort of developed presenting the opportunities in the early to mid-90’s that were in both cities.
Susan Freeman
And of course the London stand has got bigger and bigger over the years you know, with various new areas being bolted on. I don’t know if it sort of comes to a point where it actually won’t fit into um, won’t fit into the stand.
Nick McKeogh
Well I mean it’s, it’s had a, like the property market, it moves up and down so I think it reached peak size I think it was around 2008, it’s just before the financial crash that we were at that point we built the stand over a number of years and at that point I think we had around 600 organisations we’d started building the bigger central London models and taken them down. The London Development Agency had come into being and, and started being part of the stand and we, we took a very large stand up on the roof of the Riviera – having sort of moved from the basement up to the first floor and each year you know, Reed used to come and say, often sort of halfway through our selling cycle so we’d sign up the stand from the year before and they’d come, Peter Rhodes would come and see my father or myself and say, ‘you know actually we’ve got a bigger stand, why don’t you, why don’t you take this one it’s going to be better’ so we’d be out selling to try and grow it but that, that was kind of peak after the global financial crash and it was also at risk just to say so you know, we, we would take the financial risk, we would buy the stand on the basis that we would sell the, the spaces and the stands and all the tickets to go with it and you know, when you had a bad year you lost money and a good year you made money but fundamentally that’s how it worked so yes, it grew and grew and grew I think not just in the sort of competition between cities but also as London grew, it’s sort of ambition around different times you know, move up to the 2012 games the you know, we were around before there were London Mayors and I remember the first year that we had before the Mayoral race, that we had a number of the candidates actually came down and spoke. Ken came down and Simon Hughes who was you know, a Lib Dem you know, there was Steve Norris so there was sort of, we had all three sort of speaking on the stand giving their pitch for how they were going to promote London and then obviously Ken became Mayor and came down regularly after that as well as the Labour Government, we had John Prescott on the stand for a few years and all those things, that sort of political endorsement I think always helped drive engagement of the development community which then drove the engagement of the, all the different parts of the built environment sector that sort of came together and it was the one moment where everyone would come you know, together to sell London but also to talk about what was going on and, and sort of I guess we always used to talk, it was like a big team building exercise for the London industry that go away and kind of take stock and, and see what was going on but also build relationships and build connections which MIPIM has always been you know, very good at doing because it kind of gets people in one space and you’re, you’re there for a few days and you get access and conversations that, that just wouldn’t happen over such a short time frame.
Susan Freeman
No it’s incredible that the model is just such an important part of the London story and all the things that’s gone on over the years and so moving on, when did you set up New London Architecture and, and how did that evolve and what, what was the vision for it?
Nick McKeogh
So I guess that again it has its roots in that for the very early phase where I had my, my year out and it kind of then tracks through the, the sort of early MIPIM years but at the time when Ricky Burdett and Michael did that first exhibition at The Royal Exchange was about the same time that Honor Chapman who’d been involved in writing for the world city report for ELPAC at the time but was for the City of Westminster and London Docklands Development Corporation, they’d written a report which said London needed to you know, be at the centre of this kind of world city, this sort of global, globalisation of business and trade and real estate and out the back of that report Honor had been asked to think about you know, how those bodies could fund or what might be needed to sort of help London sort of ride the wave of globalisation, I guess is the way that you might describe it and in that process Honor was writing a sort of follow-up report which recommended that two entities be set up by sort of pre-Mayor but you know, the sort of London Governance at the time; one was a sort of lobbying body to Government for London and another would be a sort of inward investment centre or agency. So those were what became London First and London First Centre and in that time in sort of 91/92 when that was being written, this model had sort of been created and I wrote a report for Honor because we were talking to her about the models, and said well actually London First Centre should be centred around a large model of central London, it should be open to the public so that people can see what’s going on and actually tourists could find out more about what’s going on in London but it should have an element where you could bring the professions together and you could bring investors to sort of see London and actually London, the London First Centre would be this amazing kind of physical location that all the different stakeholders if you like that are involved in making London’s future, could celebrate it and also think about how to invest in it. Now that recommendation and I got one of our model makers to do an amazing visual that still sits in the room I’m sitting in now of this sort of room was, the idea was that it might go into New Zealand House which the New Zealand Government were thinking of moving out of, strangely being refurbished at the moment by Crown Estate and that the base of that in Haymarket would be this centre. At the top would be the offices of London First where they could kind of look out over London and engage Government. So there was this kind of vision of creating a London City Centre as we called it at the time rather than London First Centre. London First Centre was set up, London First was set up and London First Centre never became a kind of physical space as such and I’d always believed that these models from what I’d seen and because probably from the fact that we found a model making business just did something different, they just engaged people in a different way and you could have conversations and people would come and talk and point and look at what was going on and understand London better. So I sort of never gave up that idea that we should at some point you know, do this in London and we sort of imagined that it was about lobbying others to do it, the City or to City of Westminster or once the Mayor came along you know, shouldn’t it be part of City Hall and actually we put a model of central London we took to MIPIM with the base of, of the City Hall when it was first opened in the rotunda at the bottom so when it was opened by the Queen there was a model of the City of London which we thought maybe might become a permanent feature. Those things never happened and then over time I guess and it’s the sort of success of the London stand grew and all those people that came together each year at MIPIM sort of built relationships, it became increasingly clear to me that, that they all come back to London, they sort of dissipate throughout the City so the architects go back to the RIBA and the planners go back to the RTPI and, and the sort of trade magazines kind of run their events that are fairly segmented between different parts of the industry and no one really engaged with the boroughs or, or the sort of public sector in any way and certainly not the public. So there sort of became an idea that we should do more to create exhibitions. I did a few one offs. So we ran an exhibition in 1997 supported by Natwest in their headquarters at Lothbury called London The New Millennium and we, we sort of launched a big model of central London and looked at the projects there. I was then asked in 2004, skipping on a few years, by the City if we could do an exhibition around the sort of changes to the City that were sort of changes to the City that were sort of a follow on from the City changes so we put an exhibition on in Broadgate in 2004 which sort of showcased the sort of tall buildings and, and various things and as part of that we had engaged Peter Murray to act as a curator because he kind of had that sort of gravitas and standing and had put on lots of exhibitions about quality of architecture. So Peter and I put this exhibition on supported by most of the big developers in the city at the time and we engaged Rowan Moore at the time of the architecture, validation to do some public debates about whether the people wanted tall buildings, what a modern architecture looked like. We engaged Open City with a learning programme with young people. We opened to the public, we did lots of things and it sort of sparked again this idea that why isn’t there a place in London when you put on a one-off exhibition that has this going on so that sort of led to a conversation between Peter and I which was let’s sort of double down and, and try and create a space. My father was very much of the view that alongside the sort of public discourse that there was a real opportunity to bring the professionals together and a lot of our sponsors at MIPIM would be probably only too happy at that time sort of 2004/2005 who went to the positive phase of development, there was lots of excitement about bidding for the Olympics and all these kind of things going on and actually you know, the Olympic bid was, was just happening. So we managed to gather a bit of support from some of our clients from MIPIM sort of sponsor the idea of a permanent centre. We managed to persuade the building centre in Tottenham Court Road that actually we could take over their front galleries and create some space to sort of have a permanent centre and in the summer of 2005 we opened NLA, New London Architecture and I guess it was bringing together a few things; one, the idea that we could actually have public galleries. Two, that we could bring together all the different people involved in city making in one space and sort of the people that came to MIPIM every year would have a space where we could you know, do that not just once a year but a bit more often and three, I guess it was for me, this idea that actually we could do something better if we all got together and kind of had those conversations that fundamentally you know, people talk more and engage the public more and understand each other better across public and private sectors that you are likely to get better outcomes in delivering ultimately all these things that we do.
Susan Freeman
So I think this year is the 20th anniversary so congratulations.
Nick McKeogh
That’s right yeah so, yeah thank you very much yeah 2005 we opened and we celebrated 20 years just, we actually, we opened our doors, our anniversary coincides with the day the bombs went off in London because we had intentionally decided that we would open NLA’s doors the day after the decision for good or bad about the Olympic bid so kind of slightly not believing that we were going to get the bid but having had been involved in building models and supporting that bid through the sort of preceding years, we decided we would open the day after and sort of having witnessed that joy and elation the day before and we were hosting an event at The Ivy with a few of our clients and none of us quite believed that we, we won the bid and then the next day we, we planned to open so we did open our doors at just literally at the time that the bombs went off, just up the road. So, so there’s a real sort of poignancy I guess to those 20 years on a number of levels.
Susan Freeman
Absolutely and NLA seems to have developed and now has a role in championing the built environment you know, to the Government and to the public and you have recently published your skills report which we’ll talk about a little bit and I know there is another report that’s being launched shortly which we will also talk about but perhaps we can start with the you know, with the skills report and you know, why you thought that was you know, important?
Nick McKeogh
Yeah I, again sort of a story that sort of develops over time I guess. As I said, when we put NLA together, Peter Murray and myself and, and my father we talked very much around this concept that the built environment sector and I guess built environment was a word that was being used because CABE had, was sort of what hadn’t been established but it was you know, those, the sort of terms were starting to be used in, in Government and we felt that actually there’s a real need if you like for the different professions involved in the built environment to have a closer connection but also that it’s not understood. This idea of a public gallery was very much sort of linked to the idea that we felt that you know, people didn’t understand. They might know there’s estate agents, they might understand the professional architecture but they didn’t really understand the complexity and the sort of range of skills that go into making buildings and making places and, and also the complex decisions that sit behind you know, the outcomes that happen there so it’s a very much from the outset NLA was the idea that not only did we want to get the professions to communicate better together but we also wanted the wider public at large to understand the built environment. In fact the name originally that we talked about calling NLA was, was place or places on the basis that it was about the places that we create and the, the place or places actually is a good acronym for planning, landscape, architecture, construction, engineering and surveying. The sort of core professions that make up places. From a very early age and I mentioned that we worked with Open City, Victoria Thornton was running an excellent programme at the time which we, we encouraged her and gave over space to sort of involve young people in thinking about the career opportunities in architecture and, and construction and property and real estate so there’s been a link I guess at all through NLA that we’ve always tried to engage a wide public and increasingly over the years we’ve sort of been more proactive in thinking about how we do that and certainly feeling that we are sort of engaging Universities and we did various prizes with Universities and then we realised well actually we sort of need to go earlier and earlier into the sort of education cycle to really sort of dig in and, and make people appreciate, make young people appreciate the jobs that are there so we developed in recent years a learning programme where we host lots of school groups and we’d started that around the City Model with the City of London Corporation a number of years ago and as we’ve sort of learnt and, and did that work we, we sort of evolved that to become, we called it Future City Makers programme because actually we wanted to speak in a language that, that showed young people that actually city making involves all sorts of skills, that it has you know, you can be an artist, you can be a musician, you can be a scientist, you can be a mathematician but those jobs you know, in the built environment for you so we want to sort of be as open as possible. So that’s the sort of work that we’ve been doing and that sort of I guess had been running along as a programme and we had a bit of a, an interlude in Covid where it was difficult to bring school groups in and we sort of moved into the City of London in 2023 and we sort of kicked it off again and sort of really got it supercharged with our great new space at Guildhall. So that was sort of groups, groups were coming in and at the same time I have been doing some work with Laura Citron around the London growth plan and the sort of early work and thinking about opportunity London and how we kind of evolve investment and those two things in my mind just go together like you need the skills, you need the people, you need you know, the industry that can provide the skills to deliver on the investment in London has always been a sort of theme of what we do so, what we thought we’d do at the start of this year was commission or actually it was sort of middle of last year but we launched at the beginning of this year a report that just looked into a bit more the views of young people, how they perceive the built environment, some analysis around the sort of education routes to employment and apprenticeships and education etcetera., but also to interview our members about the skills they need and you know, their own views on that and that report I think was quite enlightening. It’s sort of something that we felt we knew but actually when you write it down on paper you realise there are some key things and one of those was fundamentally people don’t understand what the built environment is, they don’t understand the components within it and that comes from the fact that it’s so fragmented in professions, in education, in professional institutions – all of whom are part of a whole, all of whom fundamentally believe and do you know, all different parts of it but there’s no kind of definition of the built environment. There’s no sort of understanding of what that is. So how can you expect young people or politicians or others to engage with us properly when we can’t even you know, define it as one whole. So that, that’s sort of skills report. Does a number of things; one it tells us lots of things that we can be doing better to inspire young people and think about how as an industry the NLA can support that but it also triggered a sort of another whole work programme which was saying, well if we don’t fix, which I think you’ve talked about for some time Susan, the sort of branding issue of the industry, then you are never going to be able to persuade Government or, or the wider public that it’s a place for them or an opportunity actually for them because what you discover with most of the young people that come through our doors is they just want opportunity, they want opportunity, a lot of the kids that come through are from you know, parts of London that don’t have opportunity, they wouldn’t know anything about the parts of, of the built environment industry, the real estate industry or the architecture, engineering, construction industry but they want opportunity and they want to sort of get jobs where they think you know, they can own their own house one day and, and get on and the teachers would often say that, it’s like you know, you talk to these young people about the opportunities but you talk in terms of the sort of the environmental opportunities and the social value and all these things but you never say how much do you earn if you’re a planner, how much do you earn if you’re a developer, and actually when you do and when we’ve asked you about this it’s a massively you know, not just purposeful but also potentially profitable endeavour to get involved in the built environment and, and for these young people they want to see opportunity as well as purpose and they want to be able to see a sector for them to go into and certainly their parents want them to go and do things that, that will you know, further their own lives. And yet we don’t really, we don’t really sell the industry in that way so, so I think it kind of got us thinking about a few things and led to, as you say, some further work that we’ll be launching at the London Real Estate Forum this year.
Susan Freeman
It’s so interesting and so important these outreach projects to go into the schools. My last podcast guest, Cath Webster from Thriving Investments, I asked her how she got involved in real estate, she was just inspired by somebody who came to her school and, and talked about working in real estate and she was so inspired that she followed that route so.
Nick McKeogh
Well it’s a theme of mine at the moment to ask everyone I sit next to at a you know, a dinner or a conference or, or an event is you know, how did you come into the industry and you realise like most things in life, that these things are coincidences, sometimes they’ve been inspired by someone, sometimes it’s a family member but, but so often people in our industry have come by circuitous routes you know, and yes there are those that you know have followed professional paths and often those professional paths you know, architect you know, becomes a property developer or an economist becomes you know, a member of an architectural practice or vice versa so there’s all these skill sets that we need and increasingly and we are seeing this with our membership at NLA is that businesses need to be what we would call sort of bilingual or multilingual. So you might be an architecture practice but you need to understand internal rates of return, you need to understand the planning conditions, you need to understand you know particularly around sustainability some of the engineering issues and vice versa and any part so most businesses have all sorts of skill sets across them. They might be specialising one of the professions or leading in part of the work that we do but increasingly you are getting sort of into disciplinary skills and different types of new skills coming in particularly around sort of technology and sustainability into these businesses so actually all this kind of links and I guess it links to why we thought we’d set up NLA in the first place is that you know, you have to understand all the different parts of the team that’s making a building and a place and sustaining that place if you are going to be successful in your endeavour and actually the better you can understand the politician and the, and the planner who’s making a decision, the better you can understand the investor, the better you can understand the local community that it’s going to impact, the better the outcome is going to be. So I think you know, for me there’s, there’s a sort of strand that runs through my whole career which is saying, ‘we’ve just got to do better at working together’ and we talk about partnership but very often you know, there’s not true trust or understanding in different parts of development teams let alone the communities that they are affecting so I think you know, that education piece around you know, what the built environment sector is and the scale of it, it is really important and you know, that’s quite revealing when you, when you do put that together to tell a different narrative I think and to Government equally, that’s, that’s increasingly important I think as well.
Susan Freeman
So you in your skills report you hit upon you know, something that as you say you, you knew that the built environment sector is largely misunderstood by people outside the sector and in fact you know some parts of the sector don’t really understand other parts of the sector so the report that you’re I think going to launch at London Real Estate Forum on the built environment is, you’re doing this with GLA Economics and the LSC, why is this report important and what does it show?
Nick McKeogh
Again another big question that, that sort of I’ll try and answer because there’s lots of strands to this. As I said, you know I guess it is something we’ve known and something that develops particularly around the skills piece but it also developed around the conversation around the London growth plan and the work we’ve been doing with Opportunity London because what I realise is is you built the London growth plan, we talk about growth sectors and it links to the industrial strategy and it links to lots of different political drivers but the growth plan talks about growth sectors and you realise that all policy leads to these things and I realised it when we were working on the skills report because I went to see GLA Skills to sort of get their insights and see how we might work more closely with them and the Head of GLA Skills said, ‘well you know it’s fantastic you know what you’re doing and you know, we do have a fairly large budget around further education and we, we effectively employ every single careers advisor across every school in London’, so I said, ‘brilliant why don’t we host them here, we’ll happily, I’ll give every one of them a talk about the built environment sector and we can, we can you know, our team will talk all about inspiring future city makers’ and he said, ‘well actually we can’t do that because our budget has to be directed against growth sectors for the London economy or large scale employers and in the growth plan the built environment is not one of them. In fact construction is a facilitator, it’s an important sector so we’re interested in construction but it’s a facilitator for financial services, creative industries, life sciences etc, etc., the sectors that are in the growth plan’. So you suddenly realise, well I suddenly realised perhaps that you’ve got to get to the economist because if you get to the economist, the economist define you as a growth sector or a sort of major employer then, then your mind set shifts or Government’s mind-set shifts and then everything moves towards it. So that sort of understanding that we need to define the sector but also do it from an economic lens is what sort of led to the work we are doing and, and you know I did, fortunately we have a good relationship with the GLA, so I you know, then started engaging with GLA Economics and Adam Yousef there who Heads up GLA Economics was really receptive to the conversation about saying well how do we you know define this as a sector properly and how do we go about doing that in a way that economists will understand and respect because that’s the only way that you can sort of get traction. So we started working with him and his team around trying to say well how do we define this in a way that people understand and how do we find it economically. So we did some work around well what are the core professions, the SIC and SOC codes and these kind of economic terms that I didn’t know. We engaged Tony Travis and Genevieve Treadwell at LSE and they kind of got involved in the conversation and we, we sort of came together to define you know, how we would define the core professions and then start looking at the scale of it and Adam, I remember his team sort of coming back to me and sort of being quite excited and saying, ‘well we’ve gone through and we’ve looked at you know, what, what we can absolutely definitively you know, understand as being the aggregation of real estate and property and housing and architecture and construction and engineering and you know, various sort of other professions that are easy to quantify in statistical terms and actually we aggregate it, it’s about if not bigger than the financial services sector in London’. That is extraordinary and is a huge employer so it was quite exciting to sort of hear from someone else what we kind of already knew but also see that it was quite exciting to them because what started to emerge was actually well this is no different to what happened in the 80’s where the financial services sector got together lawyers and accountants and bankers and insurance companies and said well actually the financial service sector is one thing that’s interlinked. It’s a driver of the economy and it’s actually world beating in London and that’s something that the Thatcher Government at the time got behind and really thought actually you know, this is something that we could, if we get behind it from a sort of policy regulatory taxation skills point of view, then this will, will drive the UK economy so financial services had done it in the 80’s. We then sort of used the example of Craigton Industries, another one of the great sectors in the London plan, another area where London and the UK is absolutely globally leading and you realise the same thing happened there you know, a group got together and said, ‘well if we put together TV and film and actually architecture in that sector as well and IT services and various things, we can, we can create a scale and an understanding of a sector that the Government can get behind and really start to change its attitude towards…’ and you know they did again tax breaks for films and all these kind of things which created jobs. So we sort of got onto this idea that actually maybe now is the time for the built environment to have its big bang moment like they did in financial services in the 80’s and perhaps we could persuade through economic proper sort of statistical evidence that the built environment in the UK you know really needs to be thought about differently fundamentally as a sector. So that, that’s what we’re going to be launching is a report that’s working with GLA Economics with LSC and also we brought Polygon Partners in, Elizabeth Rapoport and colleagues to sort of put together a sort of wider piece of analysis and we done it across the UK and it turns out that you know, just those core professions when aggregated is about 24% of UK GVA, it’s about 588 billion pounds of value that we create for the UK economy, that’s twice the size of the financial and insurance sectors put together, it’s four times the size of the creative industries and it’s about 12%, 1 in 8 jobs in the country, about 3.8 million people and not only that – just two more stats because I get very excited when I think about it – one, is that’s actually much more geographically spread than financial services or creative industries outside London because obviously estate agents, housing officers, planning departments you know, all the things related to the maintenance and construction of housing and office and buildings and cities and railways and waterworks and all those kind of things happen all over the country, so it’s geographically spread, it’s true for the whole country and therefore I think relevant to the Government but also it’s growing you know, the need to build homes, the need to decarbonise is something that you know, is, is not going away so our sector is going not only be important but it’s going to grow and that’s very important and then the final aspect is that we’re also world leading, there is undoubtedly in my mind and there’s further research to do but London is at the centre of excellence for the built environment whether that’s real estate investment from you know Canadian or Australian funds that, that chose to send to their investment activities from London or whether it’s you know, KPF or Ginza from America citing you know, their largest international studios in London whether it’s Ara or Atkins or Arcadis or some of these amazing cross-sector built environment consultancies, whose largest offices are in London whether it’s JLL or CB Arial Cushman’s who have their largest international offices based in London you know, all these things make us this incredible ecosystem in the UK that’s at the centre of excellence so, so we’re the largest sector in the UK economy, we’re growing and we’re number 1 globally. So to me if we can get that message to Government we can start to shift the fundamentals, not the, the all the bits that we shout about and we know to be true but to sort of say we are a great sector in its own right and if you put the built environment into that category, all policy starts to shift around that, that sort of acknowledgement.
Susan Freeman
It’s amazing, I mean fantastic and let’s hope that you get that message through to the Treasury and the Mayor and it sort of actually answers a lot of the questions that we have discussed over the years about you know, why aren’t we involved with this amazing sector, why isn’t it taken more seriously and I think the answer you provided, you provided the answer, it’s just not understood so that’s fantastic.
Nick McKeogh
Yeah well and I guess it’s on all of us really and, and you know I think in, in thinking about this it’s not about saying that any one of the professional institutions or the people that you know you’ve talked to over the years or I talk to are wrong or don’t have absolute purpose in what we’re doing. Those all connect together I think we just need to have this literally a sort of branding exercise or message which says you know, we are all part of the built environment sector, the built environment sector has this scale and we’re all you know, we connect together to do this. There is still relevance in all parts of the built environment, all the discussions and arguments and conversations we have with Government about policy in different areas and the professions all have their part to play in that but fundamentally we need to you know, get behind the message that we are one and that one thing has a real purpose that can support the Government and particularly the current Government which is made you know, build, build, build at the centre of its economic growth strategy. Rightly in my view but we can’t just think of us as a facilitator of other growth. We have to think of it as a growth sector in its own right. We have to think about policy and regulation and taxation for the built environment and all the components of it to allow it to thrive, not that it is there to facilitate other sectors to thrive and is taxed you know and kind of regulated in a slightly different way.
Susan Freeman
So we will all look out for the official launch which is going to be at London Real Estate Forum which is coming up pretty shortly at the Guildhall. Now you have mentioned Opportunity London a couple of times and I know a lot of our listeners will know Opportunity London, some won’t. So perhaps you can tell us a little bit about you know, why did Opportunity London come into existence. Why, why was it considered necessary and you know, what are its objectives and how is it doing led by the wonderful Jace Tyrrell.
Nick McKeogh
Yeah well again a sort of a connective story back to some of the things we’ve talked about Susan, so as I mentioned earlier when we sort of went through Covid I made a decision that we wouldn’t carry on running the London stand ourselves, the risk actually as a small business was high and you know to a certain extent you know, it became more challenging on a number of factors. So some of our client’s felt MIPIM was less relevant or, or more challenging maybe to sort of justify you know what is often perceived as a sort of a, a bunch of men you know drinking champagne in a yacht on the shores of, of the Mediterranean whereas whether that’s true or not it sort of impacted on, on that sort of proposition and, and for us as an organiser it had become increasingly challenging because the organisers of MIPIM had sort of made the margins become more and more expensive to put the show on and more challenging to charge people to go. So, so it had been tough for a while and then Covid came along and you know, presented huge challenges because the show was cancelled and you know, we were in the middle of that but out the other side of that I was considering how you know, we could continue to do that or, or do things and there are some you know key individuals I guess at the time that, that were sort of, had been involved in that, Darren Rodwell who’d been leading the London Councils and Boroughs point of view, the sort of engagement of Boroughs actually Rob Perrin’s previously Tony had been much involved but Rob over more recent years with Berkeley Group who had sort of seen the value and sort of seen through like the sort of circus of MIPIM and still considered you know, huge value in that endeavour. Catherine McGuinness who was leader of the City of London Corporation, Jules Pipe who had been coming down as Deputy Mayor and sort of championing it in City Hall as a worthwhile endeavour again and we sort of got together and talked around the fact that well I guess what he actually said was, ‘why the hell aren’t you going to do MIPIM the one time that London comes together and sells itself and it’s really important’ and I said, ‘well you know if you want to foot the 3.5 million pound bill and take the risks then be my guest I’ll run it for you’ and they said, ‘hang on a second’. And the other thing I said was, ‘look if MIPIM’s the answer, what’s the question and if the question is you know, how does London best come together from public and private sector to sell itself, MIPIM is probably whilst it’s an important part of the answer, it’s not the only part of the answer and actually you know, I’ve been thinking about it for a few years you know, if we could do more than just MIPIM and we could put a programme of activities together, actually Liverpool City Council have done quite a good job of kind of gathering their group and paying for a number of things through the year that they were doing then actually maybe that’s better’. So we sort of started thinking about that a little bit more and Darren in particular sort of driving that agenda from a London Boroughs’ point of view and, and you know working with me to persuade a few of the other developers that maybe we should put a pot of money together we could put it to good use and so we went out about sort of talking to various people and I’d been doing previous to that some work with London & Partners and Laura Citron about bringing a covariance related to climate change and the built environment to London so I sort of talked to Laura and said, ‘look you know, you run London & Partners which used to be London First Centre and at one point capital investment was kind of central to that and yet you don’t do capital investment you do foreign direct investment, people may not know the difference but one is about attracting businesses, the other is about attracting you know, money to invest in, in real estate and infrastructure and you know, sure you should be part of this story’ and I think she sort of recognised that so Laura and I kind of got together about okay what’s the engine and she questioned you know, how you go about that and how you run an organisation properly and ultimately we came up alongside the others I mentioned in thinking about an organisation that brought together London Council’s representing all the Boroughs, the Mayor, City of London Corporation in terms of London governance, that it had the backing of and the financial power of a number of the big developers and then it would put a programme together that would not only attend MIPIM but also Expo Real, UK Reef which was just emerging as a UK event, could use London Real Estate Forum as a vehicle as well but would also do a few other things so one, it would start to get a proper story together around how you sell London so invest in the sort of communication and the kind of branding exercise I guess you would say for London and we engaged on the Communications Agency and that had been very much involved in the conversation Robert Gordon Clark and Johnny Poppo who had been involved in MIPIM previously and also so it was sort of do the comms piece but it would also sort of work behind the scenes to bring together public and private sector particularly working with the Boroughs to sort of bring forward proper investible propositions. So you know, you can’t just turn up at MIPIM as a Borough and say, ‘here’s a lovely bit of land but actually we don’t own half of it and it’s got no planning permission’ and you know, you have to come within investible propositions to be taken seriously so, so Opportunity London needs to support thinking about how put together that and then also we need to and travel further and wider and talk more directly to our clients and our clients are the people that we want to invest in London. We want major institution investment, we want you know, sovereign wealth from the right parts of the world to invest. We want people who have interest in long-term sustainable investment so you need to go and talk to those people, you need to understand what they want as well as telling them what we want. So we put all those things together into a programme and, and Laura and I were sort of convinced that we also need to make sure that we then have someone who could champion that programme but as we moved into the next phase of going around the world we felt we needed a, a sort of super salesman for London, someone who could do that role but also who could really understand the partnerships and the layers of complexity in the public and private sector and you know that, that’s, we talked about multilingual before but it’s rare to find people who truly understand Government and politics and investors and real estate and there was one name on both of mine and Laura’s lips when we were thinking about the person who, who’d left London to go and do some work in Sydney but we’d heard maybe was kind of longing to come back to London and that was Jace so we, we made sure he was aware that we were looking for someone that fitted some of the skill sets that he had and we had a conversation and said, ‘look you know, actually would you be interested in coming back to London and taking on this role because we think it’s ideally suited to your skills’. We can put the weight if you like of the NLA membership and sort of built environment brains and we can put the might of London & Partners in its international offices and it’s kind of understanding of business and investment and, and we can build a sort of small and very efficient and beautifully formed team to sort of support the sort of ideas that, that we’d said and we can, we can sort of put our organisations behind that. So that’s what we did and we created a joint venture which is 50% owned and managed by NLA and London & Partners, Jace is the CEO and now we run a programme where Jace does quite extensive tours into key parts of the world where we know investment is flowing into London and there’s bridges to be made and opportunities to be seized so we do, so North American tour late spring, early summer. We’re doing a Middle East tour around sort of City Scape Show this autumn and then on to Asia Pacific region. We also do late summer sort of European around Expo Real. So we kind of make sure that Jace is out talking to some of those big institution investors and as he goes round the world and there are real opportunities then some of our both public and private sector partners can come and join in and on top of that we can tie in a few study tours so we’ve done a very successful you know, you joined us a year or so ago to, to New York. We’ve done three study tours to New York which has been really, really useful in terms of understanding how they are doing things but also at the same time talking to private equity and institutional investors in New York about where they want to put their money and what London needs to do to attract that money so you’ve kind of got two sides of the coin so yeah, so that, there’s lots of other people I am sure I haven’t mentioned but a few of the names that, that got that together but you know, we think Opportunity London it has a real, really vital role to play and not only just that sort of very direct selling of individual sites and places but also thinking about how we aggregate capital into places where we really need it so lots of work we’ve been doing around how we can get institutional funding into affordable housing and what conditions we need to do that which I’ve worked very closely with Bex Healey, 55.04 at Ara, Simon Hodson at JLL and Claire Dickinson at Quod who have sort of been an amazing kind of group of advisors who have given time up to kind of just try and get into that and we’re doing another phase of work this autumn which hopefully will bring policy and sort of process together to allow that to happen and we’re looking also with London & Partners around how we do a similar exercise around sort of energy transition and energy infrastructure projects in London where we can aggregate opportunity to get investment.
Susan Freeman
And Nick how do you measure success for Opportunity London?
Nick McKeogh
So we, that’s a very good question and we actually have a very, we, we developed a framework so, and Jace will be able to tell you the five things that I am trying to think of off the top of my head that we measure but fundamentally Opportunity London is funded 80%+ from the private sector and they make an annual commitment to support the programme. So there’s a sort of piece which says if people don’t fund you, you’re not doing the right job so there’s a sort of if you like, a sort of user survey which says you know, are we doing a good job, are we doing the right things, are we having an impact and there’s a longer term piece of work which JLL are supporting us on where you know it’s very difficult to draw a direct line between what Opportunity London is doing and the amount of investment that comes in overall but we are tracking and we’ve been tracking now for a couple of years the sort of sentiment towards investment into London so we contribute to that so as long as that’s going in the right direction then we feel that’s good. A sort of wider stakeholder investor survey which is similar to the partnership survey so we now have over 1000 investors on our database and we’re, we’re involving them so we’re also reaching out to the investment community and saying, are we useful you know, are we, are we doing the right things and then we are tracking deals and investment where we have had involvement. It’s very difficult in any real estate transaction to point to one person or one thing that makes an investment. I mean it’s very unlikely that Opportunity London can be sort of take sole credit for any single piece of investment but we’re increasingly able to track you know where we have had significant involvement in specific investments and those investments don’t, they’re not binary. Sometimes that might be supporting investment into a fund that’s raising capital whether that’s a Delancey fund or a UCapital fund or someone else and we are very much you know, supporting those kind of types of investment. We are also supporting specific projects which are looking for investment to come into them and, and you know, a number of those have happened over the last few years so we are tracking those so I think if you can track all those things alongside each other and say, well we’re making progress and then you track things like you know, just number of engagements and you know, the people that are coming along to the, we have an investment summit as part of the London Real Estate Forum so we have you know, very, very good investor engagement in that and it’s, it’s increased year on year and that’s a direct result of the work the team are doing so yeah, we measure a number of things. I think that’s what’s great about having London & Partners, and the Mayor as a partner, you’re held to account and you know, lots of questions get asked through the, the correct channels around you know, what money is being spent on and what’s happening so I think there’s quite a lot of rigor around what I’m measuring at the moment.
Susan Freeman
Nick it, I mean just talking to you you know, you’ve so much on I just wonder I mean, what is it that motivates you to do what you do because you seem to wore tirelessly you know, for London and the built environment. What, what makes you do that?
Nick McKeogh
I just think I am very lucky. I mean I am fascinated by all the things we do. I think you know, being involved in an industry that makes things, that, that creates places, that and to be sort of fortunate enough to sort of have my, my fingers in so many pies and so many aspects of that I you know, I love it. I am very, very passionate about how much value good quality design and development and planning and engineering brings you know, quality is a word that I think is not focussed on enough in what we do and I’m sort of passionate about you know, how much impact good quality development if that’s the way you want to call it has, whether that’s you know, good office design, good housing, good hospitals, good schools, good parks, good railway systems you know, I love all that stuff. I’ve always been interested in things being made so, so I guess I’m just, I’m just interested but I also love people. I got that from my father who, who loved nothing more than you know, standing on the terrace in MIPIM and, and opening a bottle of rose before midday sometimes but you know, sometimes it’s about the relationships, sometimes it about also just you know, knowing that we are people in business and the built environment ultimately is about people, we’re making places for people whether we’re people doing that so I, so I just enjoy all of those aspects really so I’m you know, I count myself as very fortunate by in a sense, dreamt up some of the things that we now do and I’m able to deliver on that and was very lucky you know, to have a father who you know, really just risk was not you know, something that he really thought about, he was like ‘well let’s see if it’s a good idea, let’s try and do it’ you know. I just try to become a bit more professional in my old age to make sure that you know, we have sustainable business models etc., but, but I have great people around me doing that as well so yeah I, I guess I’m, I like places and I like people and I guess you know what we do is bring them together so, that’s what it’s all about.
Susan Freeman
That’s a very good way of putting it Nick and thank you so much for your, for your time and thank you for supporting the PropertyShe podcast which you have done you know, from the outset. So thank you.
Nick McKeogh
Well thank you Susan because I you know, we, we’ve got to know each other quite well and I think we’re very like-minded in all these things and, and certainly some of the conversations you and I have had over the years have, have really fed into this thinking and particularly around you know, our common belief that and disbelief in a sense that the built environment is not understood and we never seem to solve that. So, so you know, if we can play a little bit of a part in changing that hopefully the next report will be a little cog in the, in the system to do that.
Susan Freeman
Thank you so much Nick for talking to us about everything you’re doing to champion London and the built environment. Do look out for NLA’s new report on the significance of the built environment to London’s economy and thank you Nick and Elra for your continuing support for the PropertyShe podcast.
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