Hi, Bill. How are you? 

 

Terrific. How are you, David?

 

I'm very good. I'm fascinated by the project that you did for the LFA recently around Warren Street tube station, transforming it into a 'rabbit warren Wonderland'. Could you describe the project in more detail and also what you think the impact was on the community then, during the installation, and perhaps afterwards?

 

Yes, absolutely. We are longtime Fitzrovia residents, and saw this competition to reimagine Warren Street, launched by the London Festival of Architecture. We really see Fitzrovia as an amazing and useful network to those who use it. It's sort of invisible for those who don't – much like a warren – and we came up with this kind of metaphor of rabbits and Warren Street as a way of exposing this fantastic community of businesses, residents and companies, products and services, and invited people to come and explore it. So, we created an installation of Lawrence Rabbit, a carrot and an interactive map of Fitzrovia, which highlighted all of the great people involved in the area...

 

... I've often known that area referred to as Arupland, colloquially - it's got that nickname, hasn't it? Do you think it's a sort of backwater that needs a light shone on it?

 

Absolutely not! It is the home for some of the most fantastic creative businesses which London has at the moment... 

 

But I mean, in the public's eye...

 

...Well, I think what happens is people have a tendency to walk straight down Tottenham Court Road on the way to Oxford Circus and miss the opportunity to go through this fantastic community, which is there to serve the people who use it and perhaps is a bit anonymous to the wider public, yeah.

 

So, tell me about the carrot!

 

(laughs) The carrot is designed to be a signpost to people who are walking down Tottenham Court Road, to pique your interest. I think there is a bit of a tendency as well, when architects take themselves quite seriously and be quite earnest. There are lots of serious problems in the built environment around longevity, climate change inequality, and very valid, valid things. But this was to actually appeal to people who might not normally come to a London Festival of Architecture event, and to be a bit more kind of playful and interesting.

 

So, what were people's responses to this? You presumably tasted all of that; you were on the ground, witnessing people's responses at some point during June?

 

It was fantastic. We closed the road for three days; we put artificial grass out, some of the businesses hosted and had gazebos selling their food and drink; we had lots of different stakeholders in the local community to come and perform. And we had a band; we had children from the cancer ward in UCL come down to interact with us on the day. And we had an incredible one-off event which lasted for a couple of days. But actually, it got everybody thinking about why we don’t do more with this section of Warren Street, and has led to both the residents and the businesses considering permanently closing this stretch of the road. So, it's now evolved into a small piece of urban design about how it would impact everybody to permanently create a car-free park in this area of the city.

 

How experimental do you think London is? How open to this kind of fun experimentation?

 

Well, you know, having gone through it and realized there is a lot of form-filling to do things like this, I actually think London is one of the most exciting cities in the world. And when you go around just the London Festival of Architecture events and see all these fantastic things going on, and in the medium term, you look at all these incredible public realm spaces, whether it's the Strand or Kings Cross or Battersea, that have actually happened as a result of determination and experimentation. So, we do see change in London, and I think it is open to it. But I think people forget sometimes that they start with quite whimsical, lightweight interventions like ours, and it takes those to happen to lead to bigger, long-term change.

 

Now, I'm interested in comparing your experience of London to your previous hat when you were running the Beijing office of MAKE for some years. How was that as an environment compared to London? And perhaps in terms of this kind of experimentation?

 

Beijing is an amazing place – completely different to London in loads of ways. I would say experimentation isn't necessarily how I would describe Beijing, given it's the home of central government in China…

 

Quite! That's what I meant! (laughs)

 

But I do also feel extremely warm towards the Chinese people. And I think there is a big challenge of our time - which I might be dodging your question here -

 

(laughs)

 

...is how, you know, less developed nations industrialized, as Britain did, and what Britain's professional role in this should be. And yes, I'm talking about the Middle East and China, and lots of other cities, actually, where we have an opportunity to share our expertise, and develop carbon technologies and deploy them at scale that could have a real impact.  I think China just showed me that, actually, quite small degrees of change can have a huge impact on the wider city and the wider economic growth as a whole. 

 

What could London teach Beijing?

 

I'm a Londoner and I grew up in Islington, but it caters to so many different communities, whether that is Middle Eastern families in Hyde Park, your hipsters in Shoreditch, your Chelsea crowd - if you cycle through on a summer's evening, you just see so many different tribes cohabiting peacefully side by side. And I really think that is what London is best at.

 

So, Beijing is more insular, would you say, or just less mixed?

 

I would say it's the centre of Chinese government. It's where the purest form of Mandarin is spoken. And it's an exemplar society in some ways, but it's just probably less demographically diverse.

 

So where is the material that you used on Warren Street? Is the big carrot in storage somewhere or is it in your office?

 

We are in the process of removing it from Warren Street, and we have got a number of different potential homes for it. We've got a theatre prop company which is really keen to take it on and use it in some of their productions.

 

Really? There's some carrot-central play that I'm unaware of? (laughs) Is it an Alice in Wonderland or something?

 

There are these houses which rent props out for music festivals, and for large events. They purchase things exactly like this and redeploy as necessary! 

 

Okay, it's another world! (laughs) And so what of the future? What else are you working on at the moment?

 

Ben and I cut our teeth doing large office developments, and now most of the majority of our time is spent augmenting existing, functionally obsolete office buildings and renewing their value by augmenting them with great new facilities, perhaps additional height and retaining that embodied carbon, and we're doing that in London and we've got a terrific project in Trieste in northern Italy, which is an old grain store on the harbour, part of the Ponte Vecchio masterplan which we're particularly excited to be involved in.

 

Wow, that sounds great. Lovely. Well, thank you very much for talking about this. I note you are a Bill and Ben as the leaders of the practice. (laughs)  Presumably, this has been mentioned in a gag before, has it, in terms of the Flowerpot Men?

 

(laughs) No, David, I'm not sure it's been mentioned in the press so by all means celebrate it! (laughs). Bill and Ben, the architecture men! Maybe it will stick! 

 

Perfect! Thank you very much for your time, Bill. And good luck with it all.

 

All right. Thanks, David!