In a special essay for Primera and NLA, Professor Greg Clark looks at a revised business model for districts and a new era of place leadership.

Reinventing Central London, post-pandemic, requires a fresh cycle of intentional collaborative place leadership. This is the conclusion of three dinner debates hosted by Primera Corporation, Central London BIDs and NLA. It is already in train.

 

Post-pandemic, commercial areas need to be more agile and self-reliant and must convene local government, business leaders, property owners, cultural venues, infrastructure providers and educational institutions. In London, the BID platform enables place leadership alliances with an approved and sustainable form. Now they have a big new mandate to pursue.

 

All parties must adopt an additional task beyond the remit of their sectors, institutions, venues, asset base, balance sheets, boundaries or formal responsibilities. They must all also embrace and champion ‘place’. Place is a shared asset and an active ingredient which helps shape whether businesses, ventures, assets, services, experiences or policies succeed in attracting demand, investment, confidence or advantage. The quality and agility of place are the source and catalyst of the co-benefits of a location. It we want places that are rich in opportunity, flexibility and surprise, rather than just efficient, we must work together to consciously build them.

 

The clear risk is that without organised place leadership, districts will suffer from rigidities and coordination failures that are costly for all stakeholders involved. Failures in safety, sustainability, cleanliness, design consistency, identity, communication, coherence, flow management, sequencing of public works or promotional events are expensive. They lead to disappointment and loss of confidence and value. Avoiding such place leadership failures is a critical task. Post-pandemic, the key risk is to fail to meet the imperative for change and the opportunities it brings.

 

Our first dinner heard from leaders at Victoria and King’s Cross. The inspiring successes of the King’s Cross regeneration sets a high bar for all to follow. Recent achievements at Paddington, London Bridge and Bank underscore the importance of station-led opportunity. Station districts play a unique and special combination of roles in our London lives. They are interchanges that bring a sea of humanity into and out of our city each day. With the power to concentrate people in such large numbers, they ‘funnel’ opportunities for footfall, engagement, experience and exchange, in exponential ways. This produces a remarkable ability to host activities for captured audiences and to resonate value into adjacent land and buildings in ways that are impossible elsewhere. 

 

Major stations are therefore magnets for bold investment and confident co-locations, if we get them right. The ambitious plans evolving at Victoria are not just important in their own right. They also demonstrate how we can use more of what we already have to get what we need, leveraging the power of people flows. Our major stations are a hidden asset, ripe with value yet to be optimised.

 

Our second dinner focused on the major changes in work and lifestyle patterns that are now shaping demand for city-centre locations, especially within the City of London and environs. The new sequence of the city in terms of ‘in office’ days, ‘work from home’ days and ‘in between’ days was hotly debated, including the intriguing question: do we need to reinvent Friday? The underpinning transport data showed us that Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays were now at a stable pattern of about 85 per cent of previous ridership and Monday is still rising back from a low 20 per cent towards 70 per cent and increasing. But the mix is now different: more leisure travel and less commuting. Friday is many peoples’ favourite day to work from home and can be eerily quiet in the City, especially during grey weather. 

 

The debate began with a simple poll. Who thought the new post-pandemic patterns of working and office use were now ‘settled’ and who thought that more change would come? The approximate vote was 25:75, with many people expecting more change, mostly anticipating a greater return to office working. Wishful thinking, or on the money? Those in the 25 per cent who thought the pattern was now settled took the view that workers (especially young workers) would now refuse to work if office attendance was compulsory and would rather ‘shop around’ for employers with more flexible approaches. The logic was that greater flexibility allows younger workers to live in a cheaper housing market, while their job is in an expensive labour market, if work is decoupled from the requirement for a daily commute. So, housing affordability, and associated commuting times, are driving working pattern preferences, at least in part. There was no consensus here. Many sector specificities and variations were cited. 

 

At the other end of spectrum were voices that viewed the WFH phenomenon as potentially ‘sleepwalking’ into a permanent productivity deficit, reduced job security, eroded tax revenues, suppressed investment and damaged long-term competitiveness of London. This debate was spiky at times and rich in ideas. A key angle on both sides was the need to enrich the office district environments around the City, to attract people back to offices and also to make the City a seven-day-a-week destination. 

 

What about Friday? We should make the most of Friday’s new ambiguous identity. It is now a hybrid day in many senses, with some people working full-time in offices, or at home, and others treating it as an extra weekend day. Friday can serve all these preferences if places are agile.

 

Our third debate was hosted by the Central District Alliance, which includes the richly endowed Bloomsbury, Holborn, Clerkenwell, Farringdon and Hatton Garden. These historic London locales have been the centres of publishing, jewellery, insurance, media, advertising, universities, specialised medicine and museums. This district hosts global icons such as the British Museum, Great Ormand Street Hospital and the London School of Economics. Culture, knowledge, medicine, charity and education give this district an underlying resilience and psychological confidence. The ability to learn, interpret, imagine, remember and heal are permanent requirements for human flourishing. This is London’s ‘conscious quarter’.

 

This central district is equidistant between the cities of London and Westminster, giving it a special role as both a connector and server of two major business hubs (hence its established roles in education, publishing, media, insurance and jewellery). It has a deep ability to host the new economic activities that arise from the interplay of sectors between the two hubs (fintech, medtech, proptech and social and digital media, to name but a few). 

 

Two imperatives were agreed. First, this district must remain attractive to diverse talent. It needs to be affordable for students, healthcare workers and young employees, as well as early-stage entrepreneurs and innovators. It requires successful interventions in housing and workspace and must maintain a diverse set of amenities to avoid becoming elite and unaffordable. Second, to do that it must increase density in locations where it is possible to provide that extra capacity and mix at different price points. This may be possible especially those that are close to transport hubs.

 

These dinner debates revealed much about that new art of place leadership. Firstly, we uncovered the need for optimisation of what we already have by reinventing places in the context of dynamic changes. Secondly, we learned that coordination is essential for agility. Faced with the need to reposition locations, we must work together if the response to changed demand is to be coherent. Thirdly, the curation of place must be attuned to the new sequencing that our city now has, with the ability to blend different roles at distinctive times of day, days of week and seasons of the year. And finally, all of this requires new means of navigating our city so that changes are comprehensible to diverse users, residents and visitors. The BIDs that use digital platforms and real-time data will make the districts both more legible and responsive. 

 

To support our businesses, workers, investors, residents and customers we need to improve the way our city embraces these new dynamics of change. Place leadership alliances will now evolve to become more like ‘city improvement districts’ to renew the compelling logic for commercial and civic success that is London’s promise. The aim here is not just to recover our city, but to re-sequence its magic in our new cycle.