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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 Nick Searl, formerly Director at Related Argent, a regeneration specialist perhaps best known for creating King’s Cross, and who we had the absolute pleasure of working together with to create the place brand for Brent Cross Town.

Nick, it’s great to see you. 

Nick: Great to see you too.

Joy: We’ve known each other a long time now, become friends, which I’m very proud of. Take us back to your earliest memory, if you can remember, when we started working together.

Nick: Well, it was — end of 2018 coming into 2019. And now we look back, of course, that’s quite an interesting time to have started doing things as well, I’m sure we’ll come on to talk about. Brent Cross Town had evolved from about 2015 onwards in our thinking.

There was a whole bundle of context, which again I think we can talk about — how we got to the point where we then kind of went out and said, right, we need to now turn all this thinking that we’ve been doing, the evolution of the master plan, the creation of principles about how we’re going to do this — it’s like, how are we going to share this with other people? How are we going to talk to the outside world? We had had one abortive attempt at starting to do a place brand earlier in the process. And one of the learnings from that is if you go too early with that stuff, you kind of get stuck. You really need to understand what you’re dealing with. So when we got to the point with you, I think we had evolved our thinking to a point where we then felt really confident. We were kind of ready to go out and talk to the outside world with confidence. And we were looking for somebody —

— not somebody who was going to create a logo and a marketing strategy, but somebody who was going to understand and get involved in our thinking, help us to evolve that thinking further, and to help us create a narrative around the place, a tone of voice, and a kind of a face — if you like, a face to the world — that we felt was authentic, credible, and something we could be proud of. That was the first time I — obviously I’d heard of DNCO at the time, but we hadn’t really worked together at all prior to that.

Joy: Tell us a little bit about what the impossible task was. What was the thing you were trying to do that was hard and challenging?

Nick: Where do you want me to start? It takes years to change people’s perceptions of a place. It takes years and years and years. And at King’s Cross, it already had a brand. It had identity, but it was negative. On a scale of minus 10 to plus 10, it was minus 10. It was drugs, prostitution, crime — you know, no-go area, all that stuff.

Joy: I lived in Islington in 2000 when I moved here, so I definitely gave King’s Cross a wide berth.

Nick: A very wide berth. But people knew about it. We had to take it from minus 10 and get it to a plus 10. And that was a very, very long journey. But it did have identity.

Brent Cross, on the other hand — or Brent Cross South as it was when we turned up. The first thing was, if you said to people, “Where is Brent Cross?”, they’d say: shopping centre. That was it. And then people who knew it a bit better — Staples Corner, that terrible road junction at the bottom of the M1.

Joy: I forgot about Staples Corner.

Nick: Yeah. So it’s like, okay, everybody knows us for a shopping centre and a traffic hot spot. And we did a bundle of surveys actually around and on the site — I say around and on the site because actually being on a lot of the site was quite difficult, particularly the first bit, because it was all closed off. But we would interview people who were just walking along the road that runs alongside the site, and we would ask them one simple question: where are you? Very hyperlocal people would say, well, I’m on this street, because they knew it.

But you would get answers like, well, I’m quite near Golders Green, or I’m kind of across the road from the shopping centre, or I’m just up the road from Cricklewood. What became apparent was we were in an intermediate zone between places. There was a small group of local residents who — like anybody living anywhere — had a sense of the identity of the place where they live, and they had that sense of it. But it was very much about their street, rather than even the master plan area we were talking about. But most people — and these were local people, because they were moving around on foot — didn’t know where they were. 

Joy: Placeless.

Nick: Yeah. They were moving from one place to another, transferring across this — it had this huge playing field that was part of the master plan. It’s 40 acres of grass in the middle of the whole area, with no piles on it, muddy — and apart from a couple of months in the summer, nobody went on it apart from the odd dog walker with a pair of boots. So even that wasn’t creating any identity, because although it created open space, it was green open space technically, it wasn’t amenity. There were some football pitches — on a slope — and matches got called off on a very regular basis because it was flooded. It wasn’t really amenity. The council couldn’t afford to look after it. So what was the problem we were trying to solve?

I guess it’s twofold. Put the two together: one was creating an identity — this place needs some kind of identity. And the second thing was to shift perceptions. The perception was: it’s a long way out of town and it’s a shopping centre.

Joy: Yes. And that was really interesting. I remember the pitch briefing we had at the time. We asked the question immediately — like, you’re not really going to call this place Brent Cross South, are you? And the answer was, that is a no-go, Joy. That is a no-go zone. We absolutely have to keep that name. The council want us to keep that name.

And I can’t totally remember at what point, but for me it was like — Brent Cross South sounds like an area south of something. When actually you were building the everything — in our view, certainly it’s a huge master plan. In fact it bears a bit of time to talk about the scale of what you were building. At the time, for anyone who isn’t aware of the project, the master plan as it was then and the reality that is today.

Nick: Yeah, the whole master plan area is about 180 acres, of which 40 is the playing fields. So it’s almost three times the area of King’s Cross. In developer terms it’s 12 million square feet, but that doesn’t mean a lot to most people. It’s about seven and a half thousand homes, workspace for 25,000 people. It’s a new high street. It is new leisure, amenity, new healthcare, three schools — education is a big part of it. It’s a lot of public spaces, squares, parks, streets.

How does that all work? We’ll come back to the town bit in a minute, because there was certainly a moment — and I think it came — it was something that had always been on my mind, exactly what you just said. And there was a real difficulty because the council were our partners on this project. They weren’t just our planning authority, they were our 50-50 joint venture partner. And we’d taken their original brief to become their partner. And they had worked on Brent Cross South for about 10 years. They were absolutely baked into this. And so it was a sensitive subject to start bringing up changing things.

Joy: Yeah.

Nick: I guess you’re in a world where, you know, pick your battles. There were lots of things that we had to get done, and it never quite seemed — it’s all about timing so often with these things — it never seemed like the most important thing to do until suddenly it was.

Joy: Well, until suddenly it was — are we — you know, this is the point of no return right now, or in about two months time is the point of no return. You go out with this name, you can never call it a town.

Nick: And I remember the process — we’d done a couple of things and we got all the suggestions. We’ll call it a village. And I literally looked at someone and said, you know, Greenwich Village works — why can’t it work here? And it’s like, because a village, if you say village in the UK, it means something. And it’s definitely not what we’re doing. It’s not credible. It just doesn’t make any sense. You’re kind of lying to your customer. It’s not authentic.

Town was authentic. It was really interesting — town comes with a certain civic identity, comes with a certain scale, comes with certain — you know, there were certain things in a town that you expect: a high street, a town square, a town hall. You kind of think about how it’s governed as well. A town has a certain — you understand it. It was also really interesting, because if you put the word “market” before town, everybody goes, that’s so cute, I love market town. If you put the word “new” before it, everybody goes, no, that was that terrible thing that happened in the 1960s.

Joy: Although it’s back. It’s coming back.

Nick: It is coming back. But at the time we were having this debate, we were like, actually — London is made up of Camden Town, you know, there are lots of towns in London that kind of grew up as isolated places and then London filled in around them.

And it just seemed to us that there was an opportunity to redefine what town meant in a London sense, but in a broader sense — what is a town in the modern world? And of course now we’ve got the new towns commission and it’s a really big thing, but we were doing this before that. We were having this conversation in 2017, 2018, 2019 — and you became part of it. Timing is everything, and you get to the point where it’s now critical.

And we did some work together and we looked at the various different ways that we could do this. And I remember pitching it into the board, and I was surprised that they all kind of went, yeah, that makes sense. I was like, my God, I’ve been over-worrying about the sensitivity of this for probably far too long. Because I thought it was going to be a real sensitive subject, and I had to pre-agree it internally and with our colleagues in New York and everything — that we’re going to do this. But to your point —

— it was absolutely critical in my mind that we were shifting the centre of Brent Cross to the town. And everything else was now going to be — if we look 10, 20 years down the line — positioned relative to the town centre. Absolutely. Rather than the town centre being relative to something else.

Joy: Well, I’m going to take us back a little bit, because I’ve been rifling through the archive downstairs in our basement, and I found — much to my amazement, if I’m honest — I found — I’m going to call this an artefact, because I really think it is one. There is only one in this building. There would have been one at Argent. Have you still got one?

Nick: I think I have.

Joy: This is what we produced at pitch. And the concept was really taking everything that we saw you trying to create and encapsulating it in a concept which we summarised as: what we need is play. And I wanted to just quickly read through it because I think — although this wasn’t intact as a concept, it was taken forward. It basically says: “we’re entering a time when what is most valuable is what is most human”. Actually, this is going to give me goosebumps now that we’re in the age of AI, because we weren’t really there yet — but we knew it was coming.

Nick: And just so — this was produced pre-COVID. This is pre-COVID, so the world didn’t know that we were about to enter into a global pandemic.

Joy: Yes, and how digital our lives, and remote work — and all of this was not there yet. “That which cannot be replicated, reproduced, automated. We need crazy ideas, deep understanding and empathy, courageous actions. What we need is play.”

“To play is to feel connected. To play is to reinvent business. To play is to keep learning. To play is to be healthier. To play is to be human.”

“Brent Cross South” as it was then — “the place in London to participate in sport and active play, an unrivalled multi-sport destination that will transform lives, unite people, and build communities” and then — I love the sign-off — “we take play seriously.” And we presented a ton of research to say: we learn through play, business people bond through play, the elderly can be involved in communities by watching play. We really felt strongly that it was a great word — a really emotive word — to try and encapsulate everything you were doing there. Looking back, because this is a 2019 piece of work — how do you find that piece of work now?

Nick: I mean, I love that. I remember loving it at the time, but there’s a reason why I loved it. So I need to take you back a little bit too — because we had started our journey on Brent Cross South in 2015, and I spent two years probably working on the master plan and working with various people on trying to articulate what this place was all about. Because the planning permission we had was quite a practical, unemotional — lots of parameters about what you could do there. But there was no — nobody could explain why, beyond: we need houses and we’ve got a new railway station coming. So we spent a long time going and seeing other places, debating what was important in a new place. We all were very aware of the playing fields and the importance of the playing fields. And we were very much thinking about how does that become an adjunct to the town centre? What does that mean in terms of amenity? What does that mean in terms of the kind of people that might want to work here?

So we kind of got all this in our head, and that would have been part of our briefing, part of what we’d been talking to you about. What you then did was you took that and you articulated it into play — but you didn’t just go, playing fields, so play. You took that and you ran with it from the perspective of business, and from the perspective of the elderly, the young — what’s playfulness on a high street — all those kinds of things. And you brought something very, very succinct to all of that that we had been doing.

But I do think that — again, down to timing — if we hadn’t gone through that whole process —

— we got in a bit of a muddle, didn’t quite know if it was right, kind of knew what we wanted. We could feel it. We were trying to say something, but we didn’t quite know what it was and didn’t quite know how to say it. And so you came in and suddenly just went — and we kind of went, got it.

Joy: Well, it was — I’m just going to say it was — it’s such a collaboration, because so much credit has to be given to Argent. The raw material was all there, such an incredibly visionary developer — to get writers in that pre-dated us to write the novel of what this place is, the story of this place in the future. It’s not a behaviour that most developers do. And I think there’s a lot of commending that needs to happen to Argent for just the way it behaves as a business — it’s very visionary and very enlightened. So it was a lot of fun to be involved in that.

Nick: You’re right that most developers don’t take the time to go through that process. To be fair, not many developers are working on projects of this scale. When you’re working on projects of this scale, it actually gives you some time because everything else takes a long time. But also you can think about a place in a way that you can’t think about a building, or even two or three buildings.

You can think about it completely differently. But what was really interesting about that was that then became another starting point — that wasn’t an end game at all. What that did was kind of boil everything down into something simple that we could all latch onto. And it was controversial. 

Joy: I was going to ask you, Was it well received?

Nick: It was well received, but it was controversial, because — you know — how can we sell apartments and lease offices to serious people with play? That’s not serious.

And I was arguing the opposite. A, I think it is serious. And B, one of the lessons I learned at King’s Cross is that you may be leasing — I did a lot of the leasing in the early days at King’s Cross, and I so often would see people walk in doing a first pitch on an office building and they’d go, right, the building is this big, it has this many floors, you come through the front door, you’ve got marble on the floor, the toilets have this, there are two lifts, these are the waiting times… and I’m like “What?”

Joy: Yeah, it’s wrong.

Nick: What are you talking about? That’s meeting 10! I want these people to walk out of here with this extraordinary emotional feeling that they just have to be here. Regardless of what the building is — we’ll sort the building out, the building can be whatever we want it to be, it’s in our control. Why are they going to be here? What is it that this person is going to be given in this room that they’re going to take back to their staff, to their board — and they just go, we’ve got to do this?

What can you say to them? Now, again, it’s difficult when you’re pitching one office, one building. But if you’re pitching a place, you can really, really unload on that — if you believe in it and you’ve got a proper story to tell. But you need to have a proper story to tell.

Joy: Well, and I would say — you know, I like to remind clients — I studied economics, and for me the economics of investing in a place brand is totally obvious. Everyone will have their attributes to sell: square footage, floor-to-ceiling height, such and such architect. And if beyond that you’re just trading, then it’s just a price thing.

Nick: Yeah. Basically.

Joy: But if you can add the layer — the emotional layer — where people say, well, it’s £10 per square foot more, but it just feels like my spiritual home. It feels like the place I need to put my — it’s going to transform the brand of my business, because people are going to say, I get it now. This is representative of me.

Nick: And what you find is that you’re talking to a business, but you’re not — you’re talking to people. Just talking to people. And those people have children and families and friendships, and they like going out in the evenings, and they like to feel proud of things. And it’s very, very personal and very, very human. If you just think you’re talking to ABC Co and all they need to know is what happens on the bottom right-hand corner of their spreadsheet — you are missing that massive opportunity to engage somebody on that emotional level, where they now want to do something.

If you say to people in London — and this will replicate across cities across the world — where do you work? They don’t name their building. They’ll say Soho, Clerkenwell, King’s Cross, Notting Hill, whatever. And that’s the identity. It’s not the street they’re on — those things that — everybody kind of — each one of those things I’ve just said, you immediately have an image in your mind of what that means. You create a sense of who works there, what kind of people, what kind of businesses, what’s the vibe, all that stuff. So people love to belong to an area of a city. They don’t say, where do you work? London. Unless they’re in Australia.

Nick: But if you’re talking locally, you will identify your local area. And that’s what people do when they’re making office decisions and moves — and let’s face it, we do it with our own homes as well. We want to be proud of it.

Joy: You know, I had a conversation with a different pal recently at a party who said something I was quite shocked by — and I’m not going to name the area he works in — but he said he would be willing to take a 5% pay cut if he didn’t have to work in the area of London that he works in. He deeply associates it with something he doesn’t want to be a part of. And it’s not about ease of commute. I was really like, well, is it because it takes —

Nick: No.

Joy: And he’s like, no, I just — I don’t have a good feeling about working there.

Nick: And when somebody says, where do you work? He doesn’t want to say — because everybody’s going to make an assumption. It’s really powerful. It’s incredibly powerful. And that’s why all of the work that we’re doing there is the basis of an identity that is actually going to — if you get it right — evolve and grow and become hugely powerful, both to how that area becomes additive to the city, and how you create both social and economic value within that area itself. It’s really, really powerful.

Joy: Absolutely. And the thing that’s really interesting — if you don’t create a place brand, the place brand happens anyway. A place brand is a belief system that people have about a place. It has a brand even if you don’t.

Nick: Well, here’s the other thing — with all of this process, we have master plans — it sounds very controlling, doesn’t it? And the reality of any master plan is you sit in rooms and draw it, and then you build it, and then people do completely the opposite of what you thought they were going to do. All we’re doing — and it’s the same with a place brand, is creating a framework for the beginning of a human interaction with a place. And very quickly, the humans that start to interact create their own version of it. And it grows, evolves, and it’s very, very organic. And you quickly learn as a developer and as a master planner, you’re master of nothing, because all you’re doing is getting the plane off the runway. And once it’s off the runway, the humans now take over the steering of the plane, and it goes all over the place.

Joy: And it’s like building a stage. It’s a stage, right? You can’t totally stage-manage what’s going to happen.

Nick: If you do — there are so many stories, but I won’t go into a long version of this — but have you ever walked into King’s Cross and seen the word Argent, apart from on our front door? On any hoarding, on anything? Who wants to be in a developer’s playground that belongs to a developer? Nobody.

Joy: I have to tell you that I have this conversation with clients all the time, Nick, and I say — you mustn’t do this, because there is a relationship that humans have to a place. They think they’re in a place. They don’t think they’re in ’your brand’.

Nick: No

Joy: Nick, what happened after DNCO was commissioned? Do you remember the first things we did together?

Nick: Well, I think we went to the pub — but after that, interestingly, you’d taken all that thinking, boiled it down to play, and then we kind of undid it again. And there was a lot of time spent in rooms. One of the things I have found with other developers and some of the people that have come into our business, is they seem to think that they can create a brief, give it to you, you win, and then say, come back in three months and show us what you got. It just doesn’t work like that. My whole experience is it is a constant dialogue. You have to be in it — because otherwise it can go veering off into all sorts of places, and then they come back and go, well, that’s not what I thought it was going to be. Somebody has to be right there, having these discussions almost on a daily basis about whether that’s — and that’s not about controlling, that’s just about a dialogue and an understanding of how this is going, because there are constant thoughts coming, and things that are going on, and it just keeps everything on track.

We had that — and I was in contact with you and Simon and others throughout the process. There’s one particular, quite seminal day where you held a workshop in your office and there were probably 15, 20 people that we brought from our team. We brought project managers, we brought people from the infrastructure team, we brought people from the comms team — this whole array of different people.

Joy: Quite a few of your leadership team as well.

Nick: Quite a few senior partners and people in there. And you did some chat, I did some chat, we did all this thing, and then we broke up into groups and got people writing words on post-it notes and all that kind of stuff. And you could see in the room — there was a group of people who were utterly excited by this whole process and just loved it. And then there was a group of people who were like, what the hell — I’ve got a job to do. Why am I here? This is really childish. I could see it in their eyes. And because I was in a leadership position, nobody really wanted to say it, but I could see it.

And just to leap two or three years ahead from that — somebody very senior in the business, we were sitting chatting. We were actually in the pavilion surrounded by all the stuff that had come out of that process ultimately, and this whole narrative. And he suddenly said to me, remember that workshop you did? He said, I thought that was such a waste of time. Honestly, I could not get my head around what you were doing. I really thought you were wasting a lot of money. And he said, it’s two or three years now — I get it. It’s taken a long time, but I get it. Because we wouldn’t have had this, would we? And I was like, no, you wouldn’t have had this. You have to go through that bit.

You know, play as the kind of front line had actually receded — it became the second tier of the language that we used. But that was okay, because it evolved through that process and we took everybody along with us. We brought our colleagues in the US along on that journey with us as well. So there was quite a lot of — in technical terms — stakeholder management required to do this.

Joy: The top of my CV, I think, is stakeholder management.

Nick: Stakeholder management sounds really scary until you just say — it’s just picking up the phone and talking to people. You can make it sound really complicated if you want to, but actually it’s just talking, sharing, listening, and taking on board other people’s opinions.

Joy: And bringing them along on the journey. I think this is the really big thing. I want to share a very recent conversation I had with the founder of a big, comparable-sized company to Argent, who said — we’re doing an amazing project with him on the European continent — and he said to me recently at lunch, he said, Joy, when we first started working with you, I thought you were a total pain in the ass. Because you said immediately when you won the job: we need you at the table now, not at the end when you’ve done the job. You were like, you need to be present here now. And he said, I thought you were annoying. And he said, now I’m never doing this any other way. Because looking back at all the projects where we talk about it being a fairy tale, not a thriller — it can’t be a thriller. It can’t be like: you go away, do your job, come back and show me what you got. It just doesn’t work.

So for us, we really believe in — we’ve got to do this together, we’re trying to represent your vision. And one of my dearest memories on this project — we ended up with Parktown for Future London, which was a manifesto in a sentence. And I’m sure that Simon wrote those words, but they came directly from a single phone call which I will never forget. It was pandemic times already. You were on the call. David Partridge was on the call, Ken Wong was on the call, and Simon and I. Very small, tight group. And we were trying to figure out — how do we ground the story and the narrative in a statement that is meaningful but can actually be opened out into a lot of narrative and storytelling?

And pieces of that tiny phrase — Parktown for Future London, which you will note is not even grammatically a thing — Parktown for Future London. What that came from: everyone on that phone call provided a piece of it. I will say, I, on the call, thought: how are we ever going to crack this? Simon, who is a tremendous wordsmith, said, don’t worry everybody, I’ll come back to you tomorrow. And the encapsulation of the project in that phrase came from that very high-level engagement.

Joy: We had all your team’s master planning work. We had play — we knew that meant something — but we needed something a bit more grounded. And it came from a very senior engagement phone call. So I think that piece — that senior engagement early on, to get everybody onto this path and journey together — is entirely essential. You have to see yourself in it. I get what we’re producing here. It’s not just some fluffy marketing. This is the deepest way of communicating what we’re trying to do to human beings.

Nick: Absolutely right. I remember the call as well, and it was very hard to set up. Trying to get those two people on a call at the same time to have that conversation was quite hard work. And that comes back to — because I was senior in the business, I was able to get that call organised. But if somebody senior isn’t driving that, you never have that phone call.

Or the point at which you have the phone call is when you present it as an end result, and if someone doesn’t like it, you’re back to the beginning. So you haven’t taken people on that journey at all, and they don’t feel any ownership over it. And you end up — the worst situation — it’s like when you present architects’ proposals or anything: the worst position is when you present something and someone either instantly likes it or doesn’t like it. And there’s no turning back.

They have an instant reaction. It’s like — these are things — you know, everybody knows you buy a house emotionally. You walk into it and you make the biggest purchase of your life in three seconds, because I love it. We have these visceral reactions to things. And once we say it out loud, it’s really hard to undo. You can’t get them back. So if you don’t have that process, a year or two of work can be undone in a moment at the end.

Joy: And visceral reaction — and sometimes allergic reaction. We’ve picked up some projects where we’ve seen and unwound other work that’s been done before. We’ve had to present this to the council, or we’ve had to present this to the chairman or chairwoman, and they had an allergic reaction — it’s a phrase we have heard quite often. And immediately when we asked, say, what was the process that they went through, you can see: the process happened over here, and then a ta-da moment happened. And no one enjoys the ta-da moment. It is so difficult to enjoy the ta-da. To be served something is really hard.

We have some measures internally that we use to guide ourselves to make sure we’re producing a great place brand. One of them is we really want to evidence operational behaviours — things in real life that come out of the place brand. We did this thing because it’s proof of what we’re trying to do here. There were various things that came out of the work that we did together which I really enjoyed seeing as proof points of Parktown for Future London. And one of them — there were many — one of them you already had in the bag, which were the playing fields. The other one I really love, because I think it was actually entirely new — a new thing in certainly the real estate and place world — and that was the Flourishing Index. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Nick: Yeah. The whole point was to have real live data that’s collected as the place evolves — data from people who were there before, the new people who are coming, visitors, revisiting the people who live next door and what this has meant for them. And through that process, over 10 or 15 years, you start to look at where there are positive impacts and where there are negative impacts. Boil it down to its simplest: you do more of the good and you do less of the bad. And it allows you to evolve and learn in real time — which is what, in planning terms, in terms of design, these large-scale long-term projects afford you: the ability to actually pivot during the process. You learn as you go along. You can’t possibly know at the beginning of a 15-year project what the context is going to be in 10 years time.

I mean, just as an example — King’s Cross planning process started in 2001. It’s just finished in 2025. Facebook did not exist until 2004. Three or four years after King’s Cross started planning, Facebook was invented. Facebook now has nearly 10,000 people working on the site at King’s Cross. The technological, the social, the economic, the environmental context — the political context — everything changed massively. And in the next 15 years, that’s only going to be even faster and even greater. So to think at the outset of one of these projects that you can know what you’re going to do in 15 years time is pie in the sky. And if you do try and fix things because you think you know, you are basically fixing in failure — because it’s going to be too rigid, it’s not going to be able to flex to changing conditions.

And the Flourishing Index was very much a part of that process. There are all sorts of ways that you can articulate that and structure things to be able to adapt. But the Flourishing Index was about learning through a process, both for us, but also — that data is real-life data about what happens as a new place grows and evolves. That doesn’t exist anywhere. If you look at most big developments now, there will be a headline in there somewhere about how they’re creating a ’flourishing’, ’vibrant’, da da da da. 

Joy: ’Well-being’.

Nick: yeah, all that stuff. And my point was: everyone’s going to say this. If you’ve got a big scheme, that’s what you need to say.

It’s like — how do we say it and mean it? And how do we prove it? How do we prove that we’re actually doing something? How do we know? And are we willing to measure ourselves in such a way that when we’ve done something and it’s not a good outcome, we’re willing to publish that and say, we did these things, those three were good, that one was bad, we’re going to change the one that was bad — but we’re going to publish the fact that we did something that had a negative impact. Are we brave enough to do that? And the answer has to be yes, if you’re going to do this. You’ve got to put your hand up and say, we tried, we got that wrong, but we’re still going, so we’re going to change it. And that’s what you can do. This is the opportunity that doesn’t exist with one building — because once you start, you have to kind of finish. And if it’s wrong, it’s kind of wrong forever. You can’t change it. It’s very, very hard. It gets baked in.

But you can evolve things on these longer schemes where adaptability and flexibility are the key to success in so many ways. So that was good. I mean, I would often do presentations on Brent Cross Town — I’d be doing my bit, song and dance, we’re doing this, and parks, and da-da — and there’d be a bundle of people looking at their phones because they’d heard a lot of this before. And then I’d mention the Flourishing Index — boom. Everybody’s paying attention. And to your point, I would say: we’re going to measure this. We’re going to put science behind a commitment to doing this. And I would then, at the end, get a rush of people — explain that to me, I need to — so we then had to write, we produced whole documentation on the Flourishing Index that we publish: this is what we’ve done, this is why we’ve done it, this is what we learned with the base index, this is what we’re doing next, this is where the money’s coming from, this is what we’re publishing in the future.

And people were just blown away. It’s like, wow, you’re actually going to do that. So yeah, and we’re going to put some money behind it — but actually we’re going out to get grants from educational establishments. We’ve got PhD students working on this. This is really valuable data. This is actually worth supporting. And I really, really hope that it will carry on through the life of the development and will gather momentum and gather support. I think there is a genuine opportunity to use that data to influence public health policy in this country, because it’s data that doesn’t exist.

Joy: Yeah, it’s fascinating. And hopefully it will be an inspiration to other developers too, to do similar things.

Joy: I want to pivot a little bit to the now and into the future. Maybe you can talk to us about ultimately what you think the brand that we developed together has helped Brent Cross Town achieve.

Nick: It gave us an identity, it gave us a tone of voice, it gave us a face to present to the world, which came out through the website and all the rest of it. But we made a very big commitment to build a visitor pavilion on the site. And we articulated everything that you and I and we had worked on together within those — the pavilion itself embodied what we were talking about in those values. There was connectivity in terms of community that would come there. There was environmental sustainability — it’s built out of timber completely. Flourishing — we suddenly created that, with a café and over the road we converted some shops. Suddenly there was a tiny — it actually was a village centre then — a little community centre of facilities that these people had never had. There was childcare that people had never had in that area. It was all miles away and difficult to walk to. So it gave us the opportunity to start to build a relationship, particularly with the local community, local businesses, local people.

But it also gave us the confidence to start having conversations — business-to-business conversations — really clearly and authentically. You were working beyond where we did this, then you started working on the office component very specifically and how we articulated that story. But it fed into all the residential marketing. So there was then a business-to-customer relationship. It also fed into the playbooks that we created — we had an environmental sustainability playbook, for instance — which people working on the public realm, but also people working in the offices, use to inform their teams who are doing the design. And all this thing — every layer flows from this core central set of messages. You have to flow it through. If you don’t flow it through you become inauthentic. Because what happens is you’ve got all this stuff that you’re saying, and you bring people in there, and then they go and look at the building and they look at the square that you’ve built — and the two don’t match. And everybody immediately goes, well, you say it but you don’t do it.

Joy: Yeah, it becomes a veneer.

Nick: So how do you flow that through from here? Part of what came out of play and everything — we created a sound and music strategy. We worked with Dr Julia Jones, and we created this sound and music playbook. And that’s another one that flowed in — how does sound and music play a role here? Firstly, what are all the benefits? And we know what that is. But how do you then flow it into the public realm? How does it flow into a residential building? How does it flow into an office building? And it’s really hard because a lot of the project managers are like, sorry, what? And you have to keep beating this drum.

Joy: Yeah, it needs to operationalise.

Nick: Yeah, it has to become real. It has to become real. And you have to be able to point to it. It has to be tangible — in the end, those things that we talked about — I mean, you know, I think about connectivity. I sometimes think — we built the park rather like we built Granary Square before we built any building at King’s Cross. We built the first park at Brent Cross before anything else. And I see people who are working there doing the gardening, talking to the children that come out of school, Gussie who’s the local ice cream man who’s taken to heart and is now chatting with all of the people that come through. That’s the connectivity I’m talking about.

People tend to think about trains and all that kind of stuff — all really important. But there is a connectivity which is this: those surveys that we did at the beginning, where people didn’t know where they were — they now know where they are. And they know why they’re there. And they know they’re going to say hello to somebody as they walk through. And that has an impact on their lives. They might be suffering from loneliness or grief, or anything could have happened in their life. When you’ve got a place now where somebody smiles and says good morning to you, and you’re in a place that feels well-kept and looked after —

One of the big complaints about the whole area was that it hadn’t been looked after for many years, because it had what they termed planning blight. It had planning permission. And what the local people would say to me is: because it’s got planning permission, every time something breaks here, the council decide not to mend it, because it’s about to get taken down — there’s going to be a new big master plan. Well, we’ve had that for 10 years. So everything’s now broken. And of course, then you start to get anti-social behaviour, and people start to lose pride in their area, and all that kind of stuff. 

Joy: It’s the broken window theory from the 70s.

Nick: So you rebuild that, and you’re rebuilding local pride. Rebuilding social cohesion and connectivity at a community level — but more importantly, at a very individual level. One lady came into the shop one day and she just said, are you part of this? And I said, yeah. She just said, I can’t tell you what difference this has made to my life. I’ve got two children. We’ve had the pandemic. I’ve been shut indoors. I live a hundred yards from the pavilion here. She said, I’ve got nowhere to go. I can’t take them anywhere. There’s not a café or a shop within two miles of here. There’s no play space for them anywhere. I now come here and it’s like — I meet my friends here. This has changed my life. I just want to tell you.

And that is a massive moment when someone tells you something like that. It’s those little micro impacts that you have. And we had a debate with the council and with our US colleagues about what are the big wins — what are the things you can do early? Big wins — and the word “big” as well as “wins” was important in this. And what we came back with is: the big win in the early stages is the thousand tiny wins. If you can have a thousand tiny wins — those individual little moments — that’s the big win. So the big win isn’t some big statement. It’s not some giant moment of unveiling. And that applies to the whole development. You can use the branding and the identity in that way because you micro-evolve. You have a thousand ribbon cuttings a year, but nobody actually cuts a ribbon. It’s another tree appearing, a hoarding changing. There’s a new coffee that comes in that everybody wants to come and try. These tiny little micro evolutions and changes add up to a huge impact on many, many lives — lives that you never even see. So building a statue, or unveiling a new great big piece of public art, can have its place for a big moment. But the whole evolution of a place is thousands of little evolutionary changes and not huge unveilings, which are really more for the developer than they are for the people. They’re all about PR moments. We need PR moments. We need to be able to communicate. But the real impact is not the big PR moments.

The other thing I would say is: all those micro evolutions, all those little tiny changes — they all have to go back to the narrative, to what it is that you’ve promised. Because it can’t now just be a random load of stuff that’s evolving. It’s all got to be anchored back to this. It’s all supported by and evidencing and creating opportunity within, the scope of the vision and the values that you’ve set out for the place. If you suddenly start doing something completely different —

So one of the things that happens when you start this — a car company will come along and say, there are loads of people here now, can I park my cars in your square and start selling Mercedes-Benz, or whatever? Hell no. That wasn’t it. It’s like — is there a particular angle on this? Is there a light that’s relevant? These are the values of our place — how does that work? And they’re like, what do you mean? I just want to park my cars and sell them to people, and I’ll pay you. It’s like — if it doesn’t reinforce the message, you don’t do it. Because if you do, you might as well tear it all up, because you’re now basically just open for business to the highest bidder.

Joy: Do you know, my favourite original strategist is Michael Porter, and his whole premise around business strategy is it’s almost entirely about what you choose not to do that helps you define what you do. I think people don’t talk about that enough.

Nick: The events guys — I would talk to them and they would say they ended up in a position where they said no more than yes to people who wanted to do things. They were just constantly being pitched ideas for events and all sorts of things, and the majority were turned away. One, because there just wasn’t time to do them all. But two, because: we look at the value proposition for this place, and does it fit? Does it reinforce it? Does it help us grow? Does it evolve? Because there is an evolution, but the evolution has to be within the confines. The values have to be broad enough to accommodate change without undermining the value proposition itself.

Joy: It’s really fascinating this. I encounter two things a lot with our clients. One is: our clients will say, here are 20 things I’ve seen at other major places, I want to do all those things here. And it’s like — that’s not going to help you in any way. It’ll be a bit more buzzy, but it’s so knee-jerk and it’s very copycat. You’re not owning your story or taking advantage of that.

The other thing we’ve done a lot — we go in — St James’s I think about, or Broadgate I think about — and when we go in, there’s activation, huge activation budgets, and activation that’s being done. And when you actually step aside and look at an activation, you say, that is not helping our brand. It’s actually — yeah, they might be paying you a grand to be there. But it’s really pulling the overall value of what the place is — the experience — down.

Nick: So let’s just talk about that for a minute, because I’m now doing a different job and I’m working with a Danish real estate investor. And we are looking at investing in major urban regenerations across the Nordics, Germany, UK. And there are lots of incredible opportunities to do that — I’m stunned at how many giant sites there are. And what I’m doing is — they’re trying to get their planning permissions, they’ve got huge spreadsheets on viability and how much rent you can get and all this kind of stuff. And I’m coming to them and I’m saying, okay, what’s your value? How are you creating value? Because you’re looking at this as — these are the rents in the city, this is how much it’s going to cost me, I can get that. It’s like — how are you going to grow those rents? How are you going to grow those values? How are you going to create the demand?

It’s like, well, the city can take this many — it’s like, no, no, no, no. How are you going to outperform the city? What is it that you’re going to create here which is going to be defining of this place, but also going to be additive to this city? Something that is beyond just a real estate exercise. And they don’t really understand that. So we then have this conversation about exactly this — because all these things that I’m talking about — they ultimately create value. They create social value, but they also create very hard economic value for people who are investing in this. And the investors are often scared of these kinds of projects for the very reason that I think they should see them as opportunities. They’re scared of them because they can’t define them.

They don’t know everything they want. The natural instinct is to know and to be able to predict and underwrite and all this kind of stuff. And I’m saying, okay, you’ve got to create a brilliant proposition here to begin with. That’s the thing. But the opportunity is to evolve and to do those micro evolutions, because as the world moves around you —

— you can repoint it. If you just go in and everything’s fixed and everything’s just this, the moment the world changes, you’re stuck. Because you’re now pointing over here and the world just went there. If you’ve got a fleet of a thousand tiny ships and you can shift them here and shift them there — what that means, from an investment point of view, is you can take advantage of things that you don’t yet know exist.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? It’s a really hard pitch to invest in. But there is a truth in it. There is a real truth. And that process, that proper investment proposition, has to be underpinned by a fundamental understanding of value creation built from the ground up.

Joy: And isn’t the problem, Nick, that risk management creeps into everything? Probably the biggest killer to the work that we do is any time you seem to be narrowing the field or scope of vision, people say, we can’t possibly narrow here because we actually need to broaden as much as possible, just in case. And so when the risk management police come in, they want to generalise and broaden place brands as much as possible, just in case.

Nick: Okay, so this is where — as a human being, we can live our lives with a set of values that underpin what we fundamentally believe in as an individual. That doesn’t limit us from what we can do in our lives — we can do everything, but we’re going to live it. We’re going to do all those things, and we’re going to have those different jobs and those different experiences, and we’re just going to live it within a set of values. That’s all. We’re just saying there are places we won’t go.

I think most reasonable people can understand that. We see businesses that — Virgin is probably the best one, isn’t it? There’s a kind of value proposition that comes with Virgin, and then they do a million different things.

Joy: They really do. My favourite is Virgin Bride.

Nick: It’s not — yeah, it was crazy. But it’s not limiting, is it? Everything is underpinned by the Virgin values, brand, proposition — that whole thing. And a place can have that too. In fact, that’s Nirvana. If you can get that — it doesn’t limit you.

Joy: One final question. And this is really — if you were chatting to a peer in the industry, and they’re about to embark on a place brand, what advice would you give to that person? Or company?

Nick: There are two critical things that I don’t often see happen with it. One is — doing this properly should have equal importance with the actual master planning and should be part of it. And the thinking that you’re coming up with through the place brand needs the involvement and buy-in of the most senior people in your business right from the outset.

Joy: I think that’s terrific advice. Thank you so much for being a guest on DNCO 20/20. 

Nick: Congratulations on the 20 year birthday. Big Cake.

Joy: 20 years, yes. Big cake. I hope you’ll come to the party. Thank you to those of you at home who are listening. Please join us for future episodes. For now, goodbye from me.

Nick: Goodbye from me.