Hello, Leo. How are you? 

Good, David. How are you doing? 

Very good, thank you. 

People are familiar with King's Cross as an area, of course, and Related Argent's work there. But the King's Cross Group, perhaps less familiar. So, do you want to just give us a briefing on what you are, and what you stand for? 

We are the wholly-owned subsidiary, the operating platform that owns and manages the King's Cross estate. So, you referenced Related Argent. There's obviously always been owners behind the King's Cross estate funding the development with Related Argent as development manager, and, as part of the natural evolution of the estate and movement from a development and regeneration site into a kind of established, more mature place and part of London, we are the asset manager, operator, and owner of the estate. So, King's Cross Group basically brings together the ownership and the management of King's Cross. 

In terms of the area, it's been held up as a regeneration success story everywhere, really, in the last decade, but in some circles, it's still being called an emerging place. How far along are we along that journey for it to become ‘emergent’ would you say? And what have you got planned for the estate going forward that will tip it into that direction? 

I'm not entirely sure what changes emerging from emergent, what the specific tipping point is, because we are a pretty established place. I think we're a really bona fide area of London. To talk statistics for anybody in your audience who are statistically minded, we will end the year with nearly 50,000 workers, students, and residents on site, with two schools and two universities. We've got our own district energy centre providing heat, some cooling, and some private wire to the residents, offices, buildings on our estate. We got over 90 million visitors last year… 

Wow! 

We have nearly 2000 homes in and just next to the estate that we are in active management of or own or have a remaining interest in. So, 40% of that is affordable housing. It's 67 acres, 50 buildings, of which 26 acres are public space and open space. So, when I look at those stats, I think of that as a pretty significant place, not an emerging place. And we've, rightly or wrongly, garnered quite a lot of column inches and press recently as a district, not just our part of King's Cross, but as a broader district and part of the knowledge quarter, for our role in attracting some of the largest, most exciting, and significant emerging innovation companies, in particular around AI, which is where the interest has been because obviously it's an area of quite acute public interest. But those are the kind of things that make me think we've probably already become an established location. And that's why I think the natural evolution is of moving away from, say, Related Argent who are a leading development manager and placemaker into an asset management operational-based placemaker. The goal is still the same. The goal is still to create a new and exciting place, to keep it evolving. That's the ultimate ambition, and our reason for being is to keep the place evolving and to keep it exciting and interesting and keep it appealing to an ever-broadening audience as time goes on. 

So that, when you visit under whichever different hats you're wearing - if you are an office worker on a Monday morning, a local resident on a Saturday morning, a visitor on a Friday night, or anything in between, that you're experiencing something new, changing, shifting that keeps it interesting and keeps it evolving. And so that can be over a short period of time, such as a day or a week or the periods of the year, or over the next three, five, or 30 years. So that's our kind of custodianship. So, it makes sense to connect through the King's Cross Group, the ownership and the management of this estate, so that we can run it like a lot of other estates in your readership's world that are actual places for London and places for Londoners that keep changing over time. 

I suppose one of the things that is still emerging is Google, for example, where the wraps aren't fully off yet, and some of the other innovation companies that are coming into the area. What are your hopes for Google, particularly on the ground floor? What are we likely to expect there? 

So, what has been a relatively recent change in the last few months is that you've seen the hoardings for the construction site be removed. That's opened up the boulevard, and the King's Boulevard is - and somebody will be able to find the stat telling me the exact date of when the last pedestrianised street of that width was opened in London, if there is one, but it is that at points it is as wide as Regent Street. We've got the non-Google side of it, which has got activated retail, household names and some smaller independent traders, and then you've got the 50,000 square feet or so at the base of the Google building, which is really exciting for King's Cross. I mean, that's the main spine which many people use to access the other parts of the estate, like Granary Square and the North. So, to have activated retail and the kind of events and activations that we will be curating along the boulevard I think is a real positive addition. 

What sort of events are you talking about? 

That's part of what I was referring to earlier about keeping it ever-evolving. I think if I named specific events, that's almost like a moment in time.  So, we are actively looking. We look every quarter or six months at what the events we have coming for the next 12 months, and do they still meet the criteria of keeping things evolving? There are certain things that have become landmark events in the calendar. For example, every year we put a screen up by the canal, and that's been happening for years. I think changing that would be a mistake because people love that. It's free, it's inclusive, it's engaging, it brings people to the estate. So, it's a win-win for everybody, community, us, our residents, our occupiers. 

However, there are lots of other events that we change in and change out, and that's an area where we can really experiment. Because what's different about King's Cross from many other places, including a lot of the other estates in your membership population, is that we really only have one adopted street. We only have one street that cuts across the estate. The rest is pedestrianised. That gives us a huge amount of control and quite a unique opportunity to put [elements in], whether they be markets [or] this evening and weekend we've got something called the wine car boot sale. So, you can add a little bit of fun instead of just it being a kind of normal kind of wine event, etc. You know, there's a little bit of fun to it. We do summer sounds. These are all events that are coming out in the next couple of weeks. We're doing lots of free events, music, etc. So, there's the opportunity to do that in the boulevard. I wouldn't say it's just that, but it's another space for us to activate and to create public space to create interest. That could be via art, it could be via music, it could be via exhibitions. For example, at the moment we have what we call art benches, which are benches which have arts or photography, and we work with Camden schools on their art programme, and we've put some of those art benches up and down the boulevard, for example. Just to create a bit of interest as you're walking up and down. 

So, there's pedestrianisation as one aspect. There's good curation of events and custodianship as another aspect. I often wonder about the ‘’special sauce’ that was added to Kings Cross to make it such of a success that it has been, and lots of people talk to the early days and the influx of students being a great help in that early footfall. What else do you think contributes to that? I mean, it's a very popular public space with the kids in the fountains as well. But what else contributes, do you think? Or does that cover it all? 

No, I think there's quite a wide range, and I won't be able to cover them all. I think some of the foundational principles – and I can hopefully say this quite objectively, and stand back and admire it as somebody who didn't have any role to play or any credit to take for it – I think the focus on creating a place, the space between the buildings, rather than just the buildings themselves. So, the buildings are good. They're fit for purpose. They meet the needs of modern occupiers. They've got strong sustainability credentials, and so forth. But I think what the original team behind King's Cross did really well was create a place that, when you arrived, because it was obviously a very compromised location in the past with a lot of negative perception and arguably reality, as you came out the station, there was very strong landscaping or water features or open space between the buildings that created a strong perception of the place. I think [it was] that not getting greedy on the site coverage, if you will, leaving 26 acres of open space. I mean, part of Granary Square could have been filled in with a building. Instead, its big, public, civic space has been given back to the community. So, I think that's a really positive thing, and it's that creation of that breathing room and space and place that's really additive. 

And then I think, similar to that, or aligned with that principle, is that there's space that welcomes people. So, this foundational principle of social inclusion. There are other estates that have maybe not taken such an inclusive approach in the past and perhaps learnt that that wasn't the best way to create a long-term licence to operate in the local community or long-term community backing. I think people underestimate or have underestimated in the past how important that can be, in particular for future success or when you come for new schemes or new planning or you need something back from the community. That social licence and that community credibility is really important. So you mentioned as one of the key things people coming and the kids running in the fountains, and I genuinely take a huge amount of satisfaction that in King's Cross you are as welcome to come and spend nothing; to run through the fountains, to study on the grass or whatever you may choose to do, to take a pause as you are to spend millions of pounds in rent as a corporate occupier. I think that juxtaposition, that diversity, and the modern and the old, the urban and the open space, or the nature around the canal and the landscaped areas, the innovation and the heritage, they all work really well together in synchrony. But that juxtaposition brings it out, whilst welcoming such a diverse group of people. 

So, looking to the future, there's the news, obviously, of the new vision for St Pancras Hospital that you've unveiled. But also, you mentioned before that you have some environmental and social impact ambitions that you'd like to talk about? Could you just do the latter first for me? 

Yes. So, there are some pretty strong ambitions, and I think, again, what is relatively unique about them is that as a place, I mentioned that we have an energy centre. So, our decarbonisation programme is across the estate, not just building by building. Obviously, you need to be doing lots of things that a lot of your constituents will be doing in in their own individual buildings or in their group portfolio of buildings. But we have both the opportunity and the challenge of decarbonising and being net zero carbon against our ambition of 2035 across a larger patch. So, we're not just dealing with the demand side of things within the building. We're also dealing with the supply side of things. So, we are supplying the energy. So, to that effect, we have some of the more traditional approaches to that around having admittedly fairly unique, but of its time in terms of having forestry up in Scotland, in terms of the offsetting process. But we're launching a very, very significant investment into our energy centre to decarbonise that through both the creation of a lot of solar panels, but also renewable energy sources like ground source heat pumps, air source heat pumps, heat capture, etc. So that's a really substantial five-to-seven-year programme that we have underway at the moment. That's really ambitious and resonates obviously with our customers, not just for sustainability, but particularly in the last few years, where the narrative has changed from pure sustainability onto longer-term resilience. And what we've seen in Iran and with the kind of fairly volatile supply of fossil fuels out of the Gulf, having our own energy and our own resilience here is going to be really important, increasingly for modern occupiers, and increasingly with more demand on power and demand for resilience. So that's the energy side, and I mentioned the social inclusion side and how we do have a good licence to operate amongst our local community because there is 40% affordable housing here. The community are very welcome and do use whether it's the school or the open space or the facilities. But there's a lot more that we can do and want to do, and so we have our own job placement or recruitment service called King's Cross Recruit that is on the cusp of having placed 2,000 candidates into jobs, and over 50% of those candidates are long-term unemployed. So, making a real difference in a very hyper-local way to Camden and Islington residents. That's the landmark scheme that we have on social impact, and we're looking to broaden that and create even more longer-lasting, sustainable outcomes for people in terms of long-term jobs, apprenticeships, etc. And that's really a life-changing thing for a lot of our candidates that have been placed out of unemployment into employment opportunities. I find that really, really inspiring. 

So, what's next? What's missing? 

More! And that's not necessarily in the capitalist way of more. We have a triple bottom line strategy of obviously delivering profits for the unit holders, who are pension fund holders in the UK and Australia. But more social impact and more planetary benefit. But we've almost run out of space here in Kings Cross. It's been immensely successful, but all the flats and homes are sold off. Almost all of the commercial space has been leased. A lot of it on long-term leases. We've got the last refresh of the kind of retail strategy and retail leasing to do. You asked about emerging and emergent - it needs to go through a next stage of evolution. But there's not a huge amount of land left to develop in Kings Cross. There's one plot, so and we're working on that plot, and I think we've got an exciting scheme. What we have done is last year, in partnership with the NHS, have an agreement to acquire the St Pancras Hospital, and are in for planning for that mixed-use four-acre scheme later this year. That will deliver quite a substantial new set of commercial buildings; 200 homes - again, 40% affordable - lots of public realm; about 25 tennis courts of public realm, as well as a much needed cheque for the NHS to renovate some of its hospital facilities in the area. So that's the next step. We acquired a hotel just on the fringe of the estate a few months ago, so there are incremental moves like that, as well as some of the more scale-up moves like the St Pancras Hospital site. So, a lot to do, both on and around the estate. 

Well, congratulations with work so far, and good luck with it going forward. It all looks…almost emergent! (laughs) 

(laughs) Yes! I look forward to talking about that and talking about the next phase of evolution too. 

Great. Thanks, Leo. 

Thank you. Thanks for your time, David. 

Cheers. Bye.