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Full Transcript:

Joy: Welcome to this episode of DNCO 20/20, where we look back at 20 projects over 20 years — how we made them, and the impact they had on us as a studio and on the world around us. I’m Joy Nazzari, and today I’m talking to Gavin Poole, CEO of Here East, the major innovation and technology campus in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Gavin, welcome.

Tell us, for those of us listening who might not know what Here East is: what is it?

Gavin: So Here East is a legacy project from London 2012. It’s the former International Press and Broadcast Centre, which broadcast the Olympics onto our screens around the world — three buildings, over a million square feet. It was the home of studios in one large building called the Broadcast Centre; the press centre housed 20,000 to 30,000 accredited journalists. We’ve turned it into a leading innovation hub for tech and creative businesses, and pulled off something no one else has tried in the history of the modern Olympics.

Joy: I remember seeing photographs of the journalists — someone had a hot tub in there. It was a wild time. And what’s happening there day to day is completely different now.

Gavin: It has. The Broadcast Centre has had broadcasting going on for ten and a half years — it was home to BT Sport, who were the first entrant, in 2013. But it’s actually a high-volume space: ten-metre floor-to-ceiling heights, amazing studio capability. Not the traditional studios that took off with Netflix and Amazon scaling, but more for robotics, built-environment research, and support to the film, TV and fashion industries. All of these things need high-volume space, and that’s what’s going on in the large building.

The press centre is more traditional — well, there’s nothing really traditional about Here East, but it's a large volume, office space again. That’s also home to our own innovation centre, Plexal, delivering consultancy and high-growth innovation strategies for government and large contractors, sitting alongside game studios like Sega and universities like Teesside.

It’s a mixing pot of ideas, innovation, startups, scale businesses and global enterprise — Ford, Electronic Arts, Sega — all coming together. That’s what we’ve been doing.

Joy: It’s been an incredible ride since 2012. As DNCO, it’s definitely a project we look back on fondly — we’ve been working together for 12 years now. I’d love to hear the origin story of our collaboration: your earliest memory of working with DNCO back then.
 

Gavin: You always forget the order things happened in when it was so long ago. Some of the earliest memories I’ve got are, first of all, meeting you all — it was Richard Gibbs who was involved in the project right at the beginning, and who brought you and the rest of that team together with Poke, and got us thinking about how this could all work. Then coming to your studio on Wigmore Street and going up that huge vertical staircase to get into your studio — and then when it was formally announced in July 2012, we were in that room with Boris, and the whole team were there, and Boris was celebrating the fact that the last legacy project on the park had its long-term use secured. We’d won the rights to these buildings — we had a great idea, and then the reality hit that no one else had been able to pull this off.

I remember the moment we got the phone call: “Congratulations, Gavin — you’ve won the bid, you’re the preferred bidder.” I remember putting the phone down. Andrew was on paternity leave at the time; Gibbsey was there. I was like, we’ve been asked to assemble the team and go and see them tomorrow — and I thought, tomorrow they’ll find out we haven’t actually got that 50 million quid we said we had. We quickly had expressions of interest to support us, of course.

It was one of those fast-moving, quick-thinking times — those early days were really fast and exciting. I don’t think my family saw me for about four weeks at one point — we didn’t leave the office for three days in the final run into the bid. We worked through the night for three days, and it was remarkable.

Joy: Well, and it’s been completely worthwhile. We don’t have Boris’s ski park that he wanted, but we have something much better. My earliest memory, too, was Richard Gibbs — he and various others on the client side put together such an interesting group of people. This project for us as DNCO wouldn’t have been the same without them.

The partnership on our side was between DNCO and Poke, the digital agency — which was later bought by Publicis. We were thrown together at the pitch with Poke, and I had to have breakfast with Nick Farnhill. We looked at each other, sized each other up, and thought “Yeah, you’re all right.” Then together we had to ask “is the client all right?” And we had to decide: what is this crazy project happening on the Olympic Park, and can we deliver it, and can we do a great job?

It’s sui generis in our portfolio — we’ve never had a situation where we’ve been put together with someone we didn’t know to go and do a pitch together. And we made tremendous friends there. That very fast mobilisation of different people coming together, putting their skills together, and saying, “Hey, you’re a team now” — not a commissioned team, a pitching team — was a totally new way of working. We really enjoyed it, and we got a lot out of it. And of course, delivering the pitch was very memorable in itself. I’d love to hear your memories of that pitch, and I’ll give you mine too, having been there.

Gavin: So — is this the pitch you actually didn’t deliver?

Because I remember we all thought you were going to keel over and die. You had this incredible coughing fit, which we thought was part of the show — and then realised, no, you really were coughing. Whether you were choking, or had something stuck in your throat, or just picked up an irritating cough, we had to stop things, get you water and rush you out. Ben carried on, and Tom from the Poke side, and then you came back a bit later. It was a great distraction.

Joy: It was wild. We were at the Hoxton and it was an X Factor-style pitch situation — the four of us stood up at the front. There was a huge AC unit above me, and while I was delivering my piece, it was blowing air right at me, and my throat completely dried up.

I had to leave the room as elegantly as possible — which coughing never really allows. There was a fridge outside; I downed two Cokes trying to get rid of it. Then they had a bucket of lollipops, so I came back into the room sucking a lollipop. The whole thing was entirely absurd. I did have to say to the guys, and to Poke: if I’ve blown our chances by coughing, I’m so sorry. But I’m also here to tell anyone listening that you can have a complete coughing meltdown in a pitch and still have it turn into one of the best projects in your portfolio.

Gavin: And the content was superb — the film you guys put together talking about what we wanted to do, the DNA of it. I think you picked up on what the local community wanted: what were their dreams, their expectations? Because they’d been a little disenfranchised, left behind, excluded from what London 2012 brought to that part of London. That was a really compelling film for us — it was like, okay, these guys understand what we’re trying to do. We’d been in the markets, on the streets, doing our own work, and then you came up with something that said: we understand each other.

Joy: And it was the first time we ever showed the idea of Here East being on the roof of the main building — I’m delighted that at least conceptually, that continued.

Gavin: Conceptually, it continues.

Joy: Can you talk us through the impossible task? Looking back, the idea of what we wanted to create was very exciting, but it must have felt like an incredible ask. What was the impossible task?
 

Gavin: The impossible task for us was: when you write a vision and think big, you dream of what it could be. I’d come out of politics, out of a social policy think tank, and we wanted to change life chances for people in East London — we knew about the social deprivation that had been there for decades. Writing down a vision is one thing; being given the opportunity to deliver it is another. It gets real.

We were given the buildings once the JV and lease documents were all signed. But then it was: okay, we’ve actually got to make this a success now. Up until then, it had all been paperwork. Now we had to go and deliver it — and no one in the modern history of the Olympics had actually done this.

It was known as a white elephant for a reason. Every Olympics needs a broadcast centre — but they’re so big that finding a long-term use for one has been a challenge around the world. Look at the last ten Olympics: derelict international broadcast centres everywhere. The images are vast.

Joy: It’s sad — they look post-apocalyptic.

Gavin: Absolutely horrendous. So we knew we had to get on with it and deliver. None of us on the original vision team were real estate specialists — as I said, I’d done politics before that, I’m ex-military, Richard was an entrepreneur, Andrew had a telecoms background. We weren’t blinkered by convention — we just said, we’re going to do this.

Having Delancey come on board right at the point of crystallising the opportunity brought in the expertise that let us put some shape around what we wanted to do. Credit to Delancey and the owners: they didn’t get in the way of us executing the vision, because they also appreciated it was a difficult location. There was nothing around us. We were in the Olympic Park, which was going through its own transformation, next to Stratford, which — going back to 2010-2012 — apart from the Games hadn’t had much investment. I remember talking to you: you’d never have chosen to put your business in Stratford back then. Of course that’s changed now — everybody comes and says how amazing it is; it’s a shame it’s not a bit closer. It was different then.

We had to get minibuses to take people in during the early days when we were vision-casting — escorted, fingerprinted onto the park, vans with orange flashing lights across a live building site, into a windswept area surrounded by Heras fencing, into what looked almost derelict. And we would say, “This is going to be one of London’s leading innovation campuses,” and people would look at you like you were mad. Our COO, Mike — I’d known him a long time — came over with his wife in 2013, when he was doing a different job. I gave them a tour; we stood upstairs in the press centre, but no work had started. They left, and he said, “Good luck with that one.” He’s been working alongside me for the last eight years now, but he admits he really thought I’d taken on a bit too much at that point.

So I think that’s been our challenge: to prove to the world that we could take something of such enormous scale and turn it into something that benefits the community it sits within, and London as the wider ecosystem — going back to that time, it was all about Tech City, and what was going on in the Cameron Osborne coalition era — but turn it into something that’s a compelling argument for people to come. That’s where the whole language came in: “to come here, be here, I’m here — why aren’t you here?” You can continue that logic and that narrative today, with everything that’s happened since. I think that was the key thing: can we prove people wrong? How do we take what was known as a white elephant and make it beautiful and incredibly successful, so that people look back at London 2012 and it’s not just about the park, it’s about what we did. That’s incredible.

Joy: I had exactly the same experience as Mike did on his first visit. The first time we went round, it was a rainy day — we stood in that window between the two big buildings and looked at a big open space that was totally deserted, no planting, nothing to look at. And the buildings at that point looked like sheds — a bit like Amazon distribution centres.

Gavin: A big grey shed. Not even as nice as Amazon, in fact.

Joy: Not even as nice — you said it. And at the time — your bid was called iCity, which I hope it’s okay to say, Poke and DNCO were like, well, that’s the first thing to go.

And I think Tom Hostler should get a mention here, his infamous line was something like, “It’s like your granddad dancing at a wedding trying to be Silicon Valley.” It was spot on, so our big contribution at the pitch was to say: you should rename it. And almost incredibly, the name we used at pitch is the one that stuck.

But going back to that first visit — you were essentially asking a prospective occupier to become part of this community, and that was a huge leap. What you saw at the time looked almost suburban; you could see the city, but it felt far away. It was a big leap. Everyone involved, and it really was an enormous collaboration, had to help build a vision that said: you’re going to want to put your technology company here, not in Redchurch Street, which at the time was the epicentre where everyone wanted to be. People’s reaction was “You want me to do what?” It felt like an incredible challenge — but a very exciting one.

Gavin: We even had policy booklets written against us, there was an amazing publication called ‘A Tale of Tech City’ about why the Olympic Park would fail. I asked the two authors, Emma and Max, to come back six or seven years later, and they said: “We were wrong — you pulled it off. You got it right.”

So we were facing a real onslaught: “how dare we try to take the tech community out of Shoreditch”? And our answer was: we’re not. It’s a big city, it’s growing, tech isn’t just in Shoreditch. Go west London, south London, anywhere — Shoreditch doesn’t have a stranglehold on that.

Joy: Collaboration is talked about so much it’s almost an over-used word, but I think the collaboration on this project was genuinely unique — and the friendships that came out of it. I can’t think of another project that produced as many friendships. Can you describe some of that? It really transcended the project.

Gavin: It was collaborative from day one. Throughout my career, I’ve always worked that way — when you’re in the military, which is quite autocratic, you’re only as good as the team, and it doesn’t matter who’s got the idea; if it’s a good idea, it’s a good idea.

With Here East, there was your collaboration to put the pitch together; there was our collaboration with Delancey in the early days before they were fully signed up, coming on that journey with us and then becoming the owner — which I think was really brave of them, and they’ve stuck with us all the way through since 2012. There was a collaboration with Hawkins\Brown, who did an amazing pitch too, with their two founders and Nicky and David coming into Poke’s office to pitch. I won’t repeat the opening line, which was, “You are expletive lucky to have us all here, and don’t forget that” — a great opener, at which point David put his head in his hands. But all of these friendships came together because we did something quite unique, and we all learned from each other. So while we were doing the design, we wanted it to reflect the brand direction, and we wanted the brand direction to riff off where we were going with the design — that helped shape our narrative, our language, and the products we were creating. The whole thing worked nicely together. It wasn’t a case of “you design it, you build it — now can you give us a brand to run through it, let’s go execute it, let’s go sell it.” It’s been completely holistic, which is why I’m still in your studio today. We’ve made some amazing tweaks to the brand over the last year, a refresh — it just grows and evolves over time. But we’re still all working together. We’re really close friends — I’m not saying we hang out with all of our families, but we can call each other, go for coffee, have lunch, have dinner. I’m going to a music concert with David and Tom. Tom took me to America; he’s coming back to SXSW with me again, and David might come too. All of that continues, and if we don’t get our little touchpoints, we miss each other.
 

Joy: The positioning that came out of all the collaboration was “London’s home for making” — and it was incredibly brave at the time, certainly from a real-estate perspective, even if it felt entirely normal for the tech industry, who got it immediately. Do you want to talk us through that?

Gavin: It needed quite a lot of explaining to everybody involved, particularly the owners, to give them the confidence it was right. I think we were early pioneers of that language moving into the mainstream — though there was one other organisation getting similar branding out there around the same time.

I took a photo of it to a meeting and said, “We’ve got to get going on this.” It was Standard Chartered — a black-and-white poster in the Underground: “Standard Chartered, the bank, was here for the makers.” I said, “It’s going mainstream — get comfortable.” But we could use this in different ways: what do we make? The makers are making amazing new technology, new creative businesses — they’re pioneers in their own right. We’re also making great minds, great spaces. We played it out across many different sectors. The fact that others were picking up on this told us it was potentially a high-growth idea, if a bank like Standard Chartered was putting it on billboards in the Underground — though it was quite brave of them too, because it was still very much emerging. The Maker Faires were going around; there was a European Maker Faire, which Tom and I went to in Rome. It was part of SXSW at the time — we were there in 2014.

So I think it needed explaining, which gave you a reason to have a conversation, and it showed people were curious, which opened a door. It kept letting us further promote what we were trying to achieve, and I think it worked — the branding let us open a door, have conversations, and people said: “We want in.”

Joy: So “London’s home for making” — was everyone on board with that concept at the beginning?

Gavin: No, not everybody. Was I? I needed convincing — though I didn’t know any different, since this was my first venture into branding and marketing at this scale, and into real estate too. At that point I was juggling: I had a whole bunch of owners and investors here, a community we were trying to land here, and a team who were absolutely passionate about it. I was a little outside my comfort zone, I was not used to it — where was I going to go, how was I going to bring everyone together? It wasn’t an easy task, but we carried it through. There was a moment where I thought: okay, I get it. I get it.

We spoke about it earlier, too — I had to sleep on it overnight at one point, and then thought: okay, let’s just go with it.

Joy: I think the interesting thing is it was unusual for real estate, it wasn’t a real estate marketing concept, it was a business-development idea. In effect, you created something that could have been seen as a rod for your own back: you’re building a community, and therefore you have to decide what kind of community you let through the door. Most real estate investors aren’t keen to give themselves that kind of straitjacket.

Gavin: But the thing is, we had to create an opportunity in a place where there were no other opportunities. We were doing something in the northwest corner of Olympic Park, which was going through its own transformation. There was nothing there — it was barren, windswept. There was a promise of more coming: residential estates, East Wick + Sweetwater, and East Bank was just a glimmer in the eye, called Olympicopolis at the time, under Boris’s tenure. We needed to do something different that made people sit up and go: “What’s all that about?” We wanted all reactions from, “I don’t like it, but I want to know more” to “that’s genius, who came up with that idea?” It didn’t matter what side of the fence you fell on, it got people talking, and it put us on the map. We needed to be on the map, because we couldn’t just ride on the back of a £9.4 billion marketing campaign called London 2012. This was serious. This was a million square feet — a £100 million project — doing something no one else had done and made a success of. So it was: why not, let’s be bold, go big or go home. That was the moment. We could have done something safe, and it would probably be forgotten by now.

Joy: It could have just been a million square feet of offices with high floor-to-ceiling heights in Stratford. And I think that would have been really hard — you’d have had to spend even more money, and I’d say Delancey and Here East invested very well as it was. But the problem with being dull, boring and forgettable is that you don’t get any attention, so you end up spending a lot more just to get people’s attention.

Gavin: Yeah — and again, credit to Delancey there. We still hold the title in their office for probably the biggest user of marketing spend; we had a lot of square footage to fill. But they gave us a long length of rope. The robot film was completely different — we didn’t tell anybody what we were doing, and just burst it onto the marketplace in March 2014. We ran all sorts of other events that weren’t engaging the normal property market — we went after the grassroots businesses to start the conversation. They allowed us to really get on with it, and largely left us alone, though clearly we had to run things past them — it’s their business. So yes, I think we were quite fortunate with the owners.

Joy: Reflecting — and I’m skipping ahead a little because I want to talk about visual identity — we launched at SXSW in Austin.

Gavin: That was a genius idea.

Joy: That was all credit to Poke: they knew where your source community hung out, and that’s where we went. I can’t remember how many of us there were, but it was a lot — we all had a house together.

Gavin: You went plus one.

Joy: I was — yes, I was one and a half people, seven months pregnant. Thank you for holding my arm on various long, hot walks across Austin. We had a fantastic time, and we got real mileage out of that very brave idea. No other real-estate company would have even heard of SXSW — it was a genius idea.

Gavin: It was great. We met so many people, and they were so intrigued by what we were doing — they all thought it was fantastic, and we got so much content to bring back. It taught us a real lesson: let’s go to places others don’t, and talk about our product the way they talk about theirs. We had some amazing conversations — I remember talking for half an hour with Jarvis Cocker about what we were doing, and he thought it was phenomenal.

It was really fun, and it taught us the value of going to events like that — honestly, there are only about two conferences I’ll go to, and that’s always one of them. We’ve developed ideas from going there: it helped us get the Esports and gaming sectors working, gave us ideas, and we met people to talk to about design and how different sectors operate. It let us launch Here East there. I remember Tom saying: “You’re trying to attract creatives — this is where they go, this is where they hang out. Go to where they are; they won’t come to you unless you engage with them on their own terms.”

Joy: I want to rewind a little and talk about the first visual identity presentation. Taking us back to DNCO and Poke presenting to you — I can’t remember if any of your colleagues were there, I think it was quite a small presentation — we were on the top floor of the Wigmore Street DNCO studio, two studios ago, and we presented two visual approaches. Let me remind you what they were, in case it jogs your memory: the first was about the exponential growth you get with technology, riffing on the trends we saw in how things were changing so fast; the other was about disruption. Can you remember how you responded to those two routes, and what happened next?

Gavin: I was very, very uncertain — I’m being polite — about disruption, at the time.

Joy: I’d say verging on shocked. It was scary.

Gavin: Yeah. I don’t think it was just the word “disruption” — I think it was the sub-narrative underneath it. It was really challenging. I thought, there’s no way we can use that. No way. And the other one was nice, but it was safe.

Joy: It was comfortable, wasn’t it?

Gavin: But you have to put yourself in where I already was. We’d already invested a lot of money into this — we were in a very uncomfortable place, trying to do something no one else had ever managed to achieve. The reality of having a million square feet, and people in the property sector I was getting to meet, looking at me like, “I hope you know what you’re doing. That’s big — it’s like three tower blocks’ worth”. I just saw it as an aircraft hangar from my military background, and I was looking at it thinking, okay, the reality is starting to bite: what have we done here? A friend of mine once said that in the military on ops, you just take yourself on that journey — but this time I’d taken my wife and my family on that journey too. It was really scary.

And then everyone went upstairs — I mentioned the big flight of stairs earlier — and we got down there, and it was like, bang, bang: here we go. “We’re going to give you some language now, which you have to use — but probably 50% of the people are going to hate it.” That was just a little too scary for me, and I think I walked out thinking, I really don’t like it.

Joy: It was great — it was a hard no.

Gavin: I needed a little bit of, as you say, comfortable suit wearing at that point.

Joy: And what happened next?

Gavin: I can’t remember exactly when I called you, but I went home — and it shows you the power of reflection. I slept on it, and the next morning I got up, probably spoke to Rich, and called you and said: it can only be disruption. We’ve got to go with it. We’ve got to be big, we’ve got to be bold. It’s everything I said about the scale of this thing, trying to make a name for ourselves, trying to put ourselves out there. We’ve got to do something, and it might shock people, but at least it gets attention. That classic line — there’s no such thing as bad publicity, you use it to your advantage. Let’s go for it. Because then we had to take everybody else on that journey too.

Joy: Absolutely — it’s been great, and it’s been enjoyable to see it stay the course. You mentioned earlier there have been updates, some tweaks to the narrative, but no major departures. And that’s been a real —

Gavin: — and we have fun. We come up with new lines that fit the brand. I always say a vision and a brand is like a funnel: the further out you go, it still gives you parameters to move within. We’ve always stayed true to it. Here we are, 12 years on from launching the brand, and I still think it stacks up.

Yes, London’s home from making has gone, but guess what — we’re still making movies, still making films, brilliant music, musicians, actors, actresses, computer games, and hopefully fashion’s coming back to us again. We’ve got all of this going on, so it still fits the narrative. I think the scale of it is phenomenal, and we’ve got a huge billboard on the side of the theatre, which we update each year with a big new message. I still think the best one was at the end of 2020: “We’re here — for anything 2021 throws at us.” You can have fun with the brand.

Joy: Final question, Gavin. This podcast series, we’ve called DNCO 20/20, to celebrate 20 years and 20 projects, it’s also riffing a little on the idea of hindsight being 20/20. Looking back at 12 years and this brand, and what you’ve created as a leader at Here East, what advice would you give to anybody commissioning a place brand?
 

Gavin: Rule number one — you’ve drilled this into me — it’s not about the logo, although we do have a freaking awesome logo. Authenticity is absolute: make sure your values and principles, of what you’re doing and what you stand for, come through the brand.

Be brave — you can be challenging. And always, always pay attention to the “what if.” You can go, “That’s what you’ve asked for, that’s what we can do” — but always ask, “What about this?” Because in that, there’s a little gem of an idea that might push you further than you thought, and something really amazing can come out of it. It all sounds like waffly words, but I think authenticity is really important. If you stay true to what you set out to achieve — we set out to build a tech and creative campus, a piece of real estate — there was a very strong underlying reason to do that. It wasn’t just a real-estate play to make money for investors, though that’s also part of the commitment, since people don’t do it purely for philanthropy at these numbers. We also had an underlying social conscience — I’ve come out of running a social policy think tank in Westminster, and my own character is that I want to make a difference in people’s lives. Having that come through and underpin everything you do is really important.

I’m not saying everyone has that in their brand, but I’m using it as an example: stay true to your principles. If you throw them away, you’ll get disillusioned and disappointed — not just in the brand, but in yourself. But if you hold onto them, you stay motivated, you stay challenged, and it’s honest and authentic, and people see it. They see you’re motivated. I get quite emotional talking about the changes we’ve introduced into people’s lives through Here East — whether it’s one person, a community, a city, a region or a nation. We can talk about all of those things, but we’ve done it. And that really makes me happy.

Joy: You have done it — it’s been an amazing journey to be part of. Gavin, my personal 20/20 hindsight is about the tremendous leadership role you’ve had on this project. It’s important to mention, because the collaboration has been really important — but the leadership you gave, and the wide berth you gave people to be able to contribute to such a massively ambitious vision — I think everybody involved would say the same. So thank you for your friendship, and for a project that’s ultimately helped DNCO develop a massive portfolio in technology and science — this was the kernel that’s blossomed into something quite a bit bigger for us.

Gavin: Thank you.