Welcome to my new blog which builds on my BBC Blog. After a few years of contributing to the BBC blog and following the sale of Television Centre, I have embarked on a new phase of my career which has lead me to decide to start afresh with my blogging. I do hope you will find some value in my postings in the months ahead. Life for me in the future will be different albeit the majority of my time will focus on helping the BBC Maximise value from the sale of TVC. Having developed a different approach to creating value based on the simple formula of ‘Land + Brand=Value’ and having secured Stanhope as a purchaser there is a need to help them make a success of the repurposing of Television Centre. Such an approach will help protect the legacy of the site and speed up the regeneration of the entire neighbourhood. So goodbye to my old role and hello to a new part time role in BBC Commercial Projects.
Whilst writing on the next chapter in the life of Television Centre will hopefully prove of interest, I also intend to blog about the nature of place making. This is a topic that has always interested me along with regeneration generally. I have been lucky in my career to date to have had a number of first-hand experiences of how old places are renewed or a new place is created. I’m fascinated by the range of ingredients required to bake these particular types of cakes.
I mustn’t forget that places are made up of lots of different types of spaces and as such this area merits some of my attention. Much is already written about space management and utilisation but are we looking at this topic through the right lens? The use of space is in the main driven by how we work. Yet we don’t really know a great deal about the nature of work in the 21st Century apart from the fact that it is changing and will continue to change at such a rate that most of our thinking about the spaces required to house work activities is failing to keep up.
So what types of topics and themes can you hope to see in this blog? I see this as an opportunity for me to address the following questions;-
- What has happened to Television Centre now that the BBC has sold it?
- Will the White City Opportunity Area ever take shape?
- Is there any hope for regeneration in White City?
- What does it take for successful place making?
- Will future working practices change the way we use space for work?
For those interested in a wider discussion please feel free to enter into a dialogue. I have copied across a cross section of posts from my old Blog to give new readers an idea of what I write about.