David Taylor: Hi Tom! How are you? 

Tom Beardmore: I’m very well, David, you? 

David Taylor: Very good, thank you. I wanted to catch up with you about the Future London Makers work you've been doing over the last year or so, looking at estate regeneration. First of all, could you let our readers know what it's all about? 

Tom Beardmore: Sure. The Future London Makers is a wonderful programme that I've been involved with for the last 12 months, since the start of 2026. We've been working with a small group of young people from estates in central London, many of them from the housing association and local authority partners we work with. We specifically wanted a deeper engagement with young people, to get their views and thoughts on what would make for more inclusive planning programmes. How do we get young people more involved in the processes that help bring about building more homes in London? 

David Taylor: And what have you found from that year-long study? Can you put it into a pithy sentence or two? 

Tom Beardmore: I can try! (laughs). We spent a lot of time up front getting the young people familiar with some of our schemes, and we also visited other schemes that already exist. We wanted to know what resonated, what's working, what's not working and what could be done better. That was almost a learning mode, both for the young people and for ourselves. 

Then, in the middle third we got more hands-on and practical with some of the schemes we're currently taking through pre-planning. A couple of weeks ago we ran a co-design session in Southwark, which was brilliant - getting the cohort of young people hands-on with something that's live currently. 

David Taylor: All of them? 

Tom Beardmore: We didn't quite get everyone at that workshop, but there were six or so in the room with us, with our architects and our internal planning teams, trying to get practical and hands-on with a very live planning application that we’re working on. Then, in the final third we've been distilling the learnings into an actionable set of principles, or guidelines, that we want to share out with the industry. It says: this is how we think things can be done differently. We're going to follow it ourselves - we're learning too - and we want to make it public, available and accessible to as many people as possible. 

David Taylor: So: what are the principles? 

Tom Beardmore: We've picked out five, and they come directly from the young people themselves. The first is that homes should be for living in, not just sleeping or staying in a place. The second is around treating community facilities as critical infrastructure - they shouldn't be a bolt-on, they should be a core part of what we are building and delivering. The third is around nature, and how that should be a part of your everyday life, and not just like a specific cordoned-off corner of a development or just something you look at. The fourth is belonging: homes should belong in a neighbourhood and should be contributing to the future success of that area. And the final one is about safety, and how welcoming public spaces are. 

They've come from a whole year's worth of programme and getting a tonne of different opinions and ideas, and we've tried to distil them into something actionable and meaningful that we can certainly follow ourselves. 

David Taylor: That's very good of you! Why share it, rather than keep it to yourselves for commercial gain? 

Tom Beardmore: Well, I guessI don't think anything can be done in London on our own. Everything we do as a business at Mount Anvil is in partnership - joint ventures, or working closely with housing associations and local authorities - so we already have a really collaborative way of working. I actually don't think there is much commercial gain in being the only ones doing this ourselves. This is not standing on ceremony, suggesting we're the gold standard of doing this. That's not the point of it. It's about sharing learnings and saying: look, we think this can be done better, and differently, and if it's going to happen, we need a collaborative approach right across the sector. 

David Taylor: What was that live session like the other day? Who were the architects, and what did they make of it? 

Tom Beardmore: That was with Allies and Morrison, our architect on Seven Islands down in Southwark. We've got a multi-scheme partnership with Southwark Council and that's one of the sites in the portfolio - the old leisure centre, right next door to the Canada Water scheme. It was great. We were touching on materiality and aesthetics, the communal spaces, the public realm, and safety - how the scheme interacts with the main road, right on the boundary of the site. 

And we were also really clear and pragmatic about what wasn't in scope. I thought that was important, to make it meaningful and transparent: here are all the things we're juggling as a developer, here's what the local planning authority cares about, what our housing association partners care about, what the council cares about. So, we tried to bring all those tensions to life and then just mark the pitch really clearly - this is what we think, where there's still a meaningful opportunity to get involved and shape the scheme, and just to be really clear where there is not. That seemed to land pretty well with the young people. 

David Taylor: I think [deputy mayor] Tom Copley is going to be at your launch. He has long pushed for residents to have more say through ballots, so is this youth panel an extension of that, in a way? 

Tom Beardmore: Yes, I think it touches on a lot of similar themes. I remember at the launch we did at City Hall around the turn of the year, we talked about how London really is going to be inherited by the young people living here now - and yet they're still so underrepresented as a group, as a cohort in planning decision-making. Their voices often aren't heard. I'd heard the deputy mayor speak about that long before this programme, and I expect to hear about it long after this programme. 

We've always taken an approach where we’re not afraid to do things a little differently. Our Makers & Mentors programme has got a long-standing partnership with the GLA and the Mayor of London, and we've had some pretty unusual partnerships I'm really proud of – like London Lions basketball, which you and I have spoken about before, David, and a unique partnership with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. So, we're never afraid to try and blaze a bit of a trail and do things a little differently. This was a significant investment for the business, taking these 12 young people on a paid programme across the year. And I think it’s just aimed to try and do things a little bit differently. 

David Taylor: So, what happens now? Is this the end of this particular cohort, and if it is will there be another one next year? 

Tom Beardmore: Yes, that's right, this cohort finishes at the end of this calendar year. As ever, we want to take stock: what were the young people's views, what was their experience, did we achieve everything we set out to? I think it has so far, but we need to do that properly as a team. I'm really hopeful to see where it goes. Whether it looks exactly the same or we tweak it slightly, that's exciting stuff I'm going to get my teeth stuck into with the rest of the team over the next couple of weeks. 

David Taylor: What was the most surprising thing to come out of it - an idea, or an approach to a project? Does anything stick in your brain? 

Tom Beardmore: Lots! If I zoom out a level first, the thing that surprised me, but sort of didn't, is that there's no shortage of ambition from young people to get their views across. There's been no shortage of conversations of ideas, and the sessions have been so engaging. So if there's any of this myth that young people disengage from the process or don't want to be part of it, this programme has really, really cast that judgment aside. It's actually the opposite: our responsibility is to give them platforms for them to be able to have their voices heard. So that was surprising, but not surprising, in a strange kind of way. 

And then if we’re getting into the specifics of it, I'd say the communal spaces internally - things like the concierge and drop-off points in some of our schemes. What designers and planners might consider to be brilliant design isn't always perfectly married up with what a 15-, 16- or 17-year-old wants. If they're thinking of FIFA lounges in the lobby for their mates to hang out in, or differently configured seating, that means more to them as young people. Those ideas are very different to what we'd normally go with in schemes, and that has been a brilliant injection of creativity. Our head of design has been in all of these sessions with me, and the Allies and Morrison team were full of inspiration from this different way of thinking. And look, we're taking it all on board and trying to figure out what we can do differently based on what we've heard. 

David Taylor: Where can people read the report? 

Tom Beardmore: In wonderful places like the NLA, hopefully! (laughs) We want to get it out as far and wide as possible. It'll be all over LinkedIn and on our website, and we'll make sure as many people as possible get the chance to flick through it. 

David Taylor: Brilliant. Congratulations on it. I look forward to seeing it. 

Tom Beardmore: Thanks so much, David!