The Spaces That Shape Us
Join us as we explore the profound impact of physical spaces on individuals' lives. Through interviews and expert panels, we unveil the secrets of designing spaces that shape emotions, boost productivity, and enhance overall well-being. Discover the latest trends, innovative designs, and strategies for creating inspiring work environments that foster collaboration, engagement, and work-life balance.
The Spaces That Shape Us
Right Place, Right Space: Contextual Design, Sustainable City Planning, and the Future of Workspaces
How do we make our spaces work harder for us? Our guests Harry Harwood, Architectural Manager & Urban Designer at Mace Group, and Will Kinnear, flexible workspace consultant and Director at HEWN, join us to tackle this question and the concept of contextual design in architecture and design. We dissect the need for a design process that prioritises the community and individual well-being, and delve into the nuanced relationship between home and workspaces in our rapidly changing world. Harry and Will shed light on the importance of understanding how we consume space and the need for appropriate design solutions.
Our journey continues through the evolution of city planning. Harry and Will guide us through the importance of creating walkable, localised hubs - the 15-20 minute settlements that reduce our reliance on cars and foster a sense of community. We also explore the shift away from traditional commuting habits, and discuss the vital balance between remote and in-person workspaces.
We end our episode with a hearty discussion on the challenges of preserving heritage in historic buildings while ensuring they generate enough revenue for their upkeep. Harry and Will emphasise the importance of access to these buildings and the need for their unique features to be appreciated and utilised. We also touch on the importance of sustainability and nature in the design process, and how modern companies are aligning their values with their branding and culture. Join us as we navigate through these complex and fascinating topics.
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Welcome back to the space that shape us. This is actually the last episode in series one which is very exciting. So it's been a wonderful series. I've loved putting this together.
Speaker 1:So today we are exploring a very interesting topic, which is contextual design. So really we're kind of looking at, you know, the history of a place, how sort of climate, culture, all fits into the context when we're designing. This is kind of from two sides today. So we have a kind of internal, external situation. So we have with us a placemaker and architect who is Harry I will introduce him shortly and we've got Will, who is a property agent in the flex space. So we're kind of looking at where, when we fit buildings into a place, how important is the context. If you think about something like Harrods, you wouldn't put a Harrods in the middle of the countryside. And then, when we think about internal, you know it's really important to think about the behaviors of the people who are going into those workspaces. How do we think about filling a building with tenants, you know, businesses that are adjacent to each other. What's going to? How is that going to impact the kind of vibe of the building? So that's the topic. So just to introduce both of my guests. I'm very excited to have them here.
Speaker 1:So first of all, we have Will. He's a chartered surveyor with over 25 years experience and has been a pivotal figure in the UK's commercial property market, especially in the flexible workspace sector, since 2005. His career includes significant roles at Maynards in Sheffield and Rogers-Champman, now at JLL, and an international stint in San Francisco with Grubbin Ellis during the dot com era. In 2012, will co-founded GKRE and later established Hune in 2020, showcasing his continuous evolution in the industry. His client base spans from local flexible workplace operators to large international property funds. Will's expertise not only covers the UK, but also extends into parts of Europe, always emphasizing the alignment of workspace solutions with the right assets.
Speaker 1:On the other side, we have Harry Harwood, an architect and urban planner who integrates the essence of a place into every design. Harry graduated in 2021 with the highest average master of architecture grade in seven years from the University of Brighton. His groundbreaking approach to architectural portfolios didn't just earn him recognition. It won and got him nominated for 12 prestigious awards, including the Reba Silver Medal, the Architectural Journal Student Award and the Reba Sussex Award. Since his remarkable academic achievements, harry has been deeply involved in design and graphic production, particularly within the construction industry. Currently, he brings his unique branding and visual expertise to the urban design and placemaking team at MACE, adding an expertise and place-based branding to their projects. So welcome to both of you.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for joining me here today on the final episode. Thanks for that lovely intro.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I feel slightly sort of downbeat after that. That's right, I didn't win all of them. Ask him the questions.
Speaker 1:Who knows? Who knows the answers. Okay, so over to you, Harry. First of all, Tell us a little bit about why this topic is so interesting to you.
Speaker 3:When I think about contextual design, what I'm thinking about is in relation to what I do every day. It's about how buildings sits in its landscape, but for me, contextual design is really about how a building sits in its community. So that's what I'm really interested in, and I think that community is one of the major pillars to well-being that is often overlooked, especially in like a loneliness epidemic, and for me, contextual is all about ensuring that the interventions we make are appropriate for what we're trying to achieve.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. Now I completely agree. So Funny Community genuinely comes up in every single episode. That I've done. I think it's been the overarching theme, to be honest.
Speaker 4:Well, what about you? Well, from my point of view, it's very much about taking those assets, even those, in particular, the ones that are existing at the moment so mostly commercial assets that we're looking at, but those that exist at the moment and trying to understand how new ways of working, new ways of living, new ways of playing and everything else that go, and how that asset can work with those communities and with those, ultimately, those tenants, those occupiers. So we working in the flex space sector, the operators themselves, have to understand what occupiers are looking for, how they're consuming space, how they're running their lives. Basically, because I think we've, you know, we go back to the 90s when I, you know, the office died in the 90s, in my opinion, you know, I was, I'm old enough, I'm old enough to remember having a single office with a dictaphone, a telephone, no internet, etc, you know, and a secretary that would type your letters for you. And then now, well, going back then, it was very easy to delineate between home and work.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:On a Friday evening when you went home from work, you had no way of being contacted unless your boss had your landline number. They couldn't contact you, so therefore you left the office, work stopped unless you obviously wanted it to, unless you were an employer but for an employee, and therefore there was a big delineation between work and the office and or home and work life. And that's gone.
Speaker 4:That fell apart with the iPhone coming around and people being able to be contacted all the time, and we still haven't got to grasp of how we consume workspace, how we do work. Do we now do it at home, the kitchen desk or a study, or you know, in a workspace like this, or, you know, as part of an office, a larger office? So it's, that's is where my role comes in is to understand how people are trying to consume space and how, therefore, the eventual occupier or how they will consume space and how that could be created for them.
Speaker 1:So when you're speaking with the client to go into to them, to move into a space, do they think about the context of that building, do they ask about the adjacent businesses or Well, funnily enough, my clients.
Speaker 4:So I've got two different sorts of clients. I don't, I don't put occupiers into building, so I'm not in the eventual broker. I don't, you know. Well, funnily enough, I do, but not as my main course of business.
Speaker 1:You, work with the landlord.
Speaker 4:I work with landlords but also operators as well. So but the operators will come to a building and if I've introduced them to that building or brought them in on behalf of the landlord, the operator has got to understand what that community is doing, how the outside world is going to affect that building and how that operation itself. I mean, we've got 6,000 flexible workspaces in the UK. There are 2,000 operators, those operators that you know. Out of those 2,000, there's probably 150 that are national or you know, have got a sorry, not national but in terms of a regional reach.
Speaker 4:And then the rest are one man bands, effectively, and they understand their local community and understand how those demographic work. And going back to your point about Harrods I use that argument all the time is about you know, you've got to understand where your market is. So it's almost a retellification of how the markets move in terms of offices. So those operators, I've got to understand the outside, push, the outside draws the business or the those parameters that the occupiers effectively are looking for. But I understand those external drivers as well. So, yeah, it's part of my job is to bring the right people to the right asset and my operators. So it is a very much a, I hope, that sort of answered the question sort of went around of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's changing. I suppose we were actually talking about this earlier and I was thinking about the kind of creation of, like the financial districts, for example, in cities and how that's taken quite a long time for that to happen. And I suppose that's because in history there was people take leases on 5, 10, 15, 20 years, but actually now people are taking much shorter leases or they're going into flex spaces, so we'll be kind of lose that history, or do you see what I mean?
Speaker 4:Fun enough in the UK? I suspect not in London, particularly probably not, because there are still delineations between and shortage. That means the classic example where we're sitting today of a space, and my argument that I use all the time was that people didn't come to shortage eight, nine, 10 years ago because it had great transport links. They came because it was cheap and that's gone. Now the shortage has lost that and therefore I think shortage is going to be the first place that we're going to see huge rise in development and movement in the marketplace and design, and it's been.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's incredible the building's still been built now, but I think we're going to see that sort of taper off to an extent and those that want to be in shortage because it's historically a tech center will remain here, but those that don't need to be, they will start looking for other drivers to push them, either financial or physical or community led or transport led. So I think that we will still see that in London. But the product within those areas, especially the city, the city was a very much a classic old school convention. I'm sat in a soup today for the first time in three years and the city was always about soup culture and they were very bland and fairly ordinary offices until maybe the Lloyd's building was built. Nobody went crazy.
Speaker 3:This is madness and inside that building. I guess from me to do with your question about districts and different kind of professions gravitating towards each other that only really works if there's zoning in a kind of spatial sense. Right, in a spatial sense there has to be zones that are dedicated to commercial use, which then similar interested professions head towards, and to me zoning of a space is quite an outdated concept and what we really aim to do now when we develop new spaces is to have a mixed development.
Speaker 3:So we want to integrate the residential, the schools, the offices. We want them all to be together. Why? Because, for example, it makes them resilient, first and foremost, right. So the more people that use a space, the better it's loved, the better it's cared for, and that was really obvious during COVID when you had commercial districts that were like ghost towns when people weren't going into the office.
Speaker 3:So now we really look to ensure that spaces are occupied by as many different people, and that comes with like a whole host of safety benefits as well. Right, because some people operating in these places in the evening are kind of there's no natural surveillance that's going on, there's no people that have bedroom windows that look out into these spaces, or there's just no life to them at certain times of the day once the offices have closed. So that generally makes them quite dangerous at night to certain people. So I think it's really important now that we consider that kind of culture, but in a much wider scale. So district areas will forever be known for certain professions, I think. So I'm kind of like how you were saying with shortage being like a tech hub, but I don't think that we should aim to have all of the businesses right next to each other, because I just don't think it works for the community.
Speaker 4:I think massively but the 15 minute city? Yes, exactly, it's something I've been talking about well, we've been talking about for a long time. What's that?
Speaker 4:Well, correct me if I'm wrong but in terms of everything being within 15 minutes of each other, and I think in terms of work, play, leisure, residential, etc. And I keep parking back to how cities and towns came about. You know we didn't have zoned areas. We had a river running through the middle of it and people lived by the river and then they built a market and then they you know things started growing. But we had this problem, especially in the 70s and 80s, where retail rents went so high that they started pushing people out of the high street, pushing companies out the high street, offices out high street. So we started building business parks because it was cheap land. We started building shopping centers, shopping parks, because it was cheap land and you had to travel to them. Now, where has got the best transport links Town centers have?
Speaker 4:And this is a big thing that we're going about. You know, this is not just a London thing, this is bigger than that, it's the UK thing. And to have all those zoned uses, all those uses within a small area and I think the security element of it is a massive thing. Yeah, that, the surveillance that people can walk out and feel comfortable walking out in the office at 9 o'clock at night if they have to work late, it's not considered late anymore.
Speaker 3:But in terms of coming out of an office and feeling, yeah, exactly, let's get the pub Right.
Speaker 4:But that's the funny thing Coming out to go to a pub or go to a local leisure center, the gym or something like that, and not feeling you have to jump on a bus or you have to get on a tube, just be able to walk to it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's huge.
Speaker 4:I think it's the biggest thing this country has got to grab hold of, and that's all the stakeholders, that's local and national government, the stakeholders on the street, the owners, et cetera architects, designers, planners everything needs to go into this, but until we can get a, I don't know whether it will ever happen. If I'm honest with you, I don't think we'll be able to get everybody together in one room and agree, because there are different drivers and different pools on each element of whether it's public money, whether it's private money et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 3:So what we do now because we work really heavily with 15- minute and for a little bit context, the 15 minute walking city has had some controversy, kind of wrongly so. There was a lot of conspiracy theories that attached to it about governments taking control of zoning lands and enforcing people to stay kind of local, which is ridiculous.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 3:That's like very. I just want to put that.
Speaker 1:That sounds very conspiracy theory. Yeah, it does, it's it Right.
Speaker 3:Well, there was like a real protest that happened in Cambridge, I believe. Hmm.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so, but we work really heavily with like 20 minute settlements, 10 minute settlements and our team at the place making team at Maze, headed by a lady called Rebecca Tudhope who has done a lot of work on 20 minute settlements and evaluating the health of places under a whole host of different criteria, but within a 20 minute walking zone.
Speaker 3:So now when we make proposals and we have quite often, like big private clients come to us with land options we will look at what's available in 20 minutes, because quite often at the stage that I'm involved, there's no kind of the site hasn't yet gone to market to be like this will now be a pharmacy or this will now be a gym, for example, the kind of private commercial space that we're proposing. So we like to jump the gun on it now and to say, okay, within 10 minutes walking distance there's only one gym and we would expect to see like three or four or there's only, and that depends right on how urban to suburban the space is. But we have a whole set of criteria and we're constantly evaluating it because it just is so important for a sustainable future that we're able to walk to and access through active means of travel, physical travel to all of the different assets that we need to get a hold of day to day to be a part of the community.
Speaker 4:I think, if we talk about that in terms of the physical assets and the benefits etc. Surely, surely the 15 minute, 20 minute, whatever it is, that localized hub that provides everything is the catalyst for all good things in the future in terms of people being healthy mentally, physically, being able to travel on bikes, reduce transport in cars, etc. Etc. That has to be the catalyst, doesn't it?
Speaker 3:Surely I think so, and we're. If you take the UK, compared to somewhere like the US, we have so much Because we're just condensed as a nation, right? So it's like we are, if anywhere. We really kind of are set up for it, but our streets are not. They do not prioritize pedestrians or cyclists. We've got, we're, very, very dedicated to the car, particularly when you go to rural England, in all different parts which I that's right, yeah, yeah, I know where you're from.
Speaker 3:I drove the station, so I don't own a car, right, I live on the South Coast, but I there's kind of a few different reasons that have gone into that, but one being that I can't actually justify that outgoing, considering that I can access everything I need on my feet. So I think there's a lot of work to be done for sure to get kind of all of these different assets, but I do think it's like almost pivotal to unlocking like Carbon neutral and all these agendas that we're trying to hit Going forward for small spaces, towns, villages. We need to ensure that they're able to self-support themselves like they, how they started.
Speaker 1:Yes, exactly yeah and I think I have like what work near home is quite a cool initiative, I think it is, and I think that's about forms part of it.
Speaker 4:Yeah elements of it is that we've we got used this commuting culture that we could just leave our house.
Speaker 4:I don't walk the station drive the station wherever it is, and be some in some hub Manchester, london, cambridge, wherever it is and I think that you know it's a bizarre thing that happened in In a very short period of time, a really short period overall, really. And We've we've learned now obviously, covid was the great accelerator and the great experiment We've learned that that doesn't need to be the case and therefore, this work near home policy oh, not policy or thinking thinking actually has got shoes, legs, but what happens has to happen. And going back to my comment about 6,000 centres worldwide in the UK, you know these local hubs, some of them really don't cater for the needs of those people that did commute and I think that's the difference. You've got to create spaces and areas that people Want to go to, not need to go to, and that's where the difference, it lies and that's the key element to.
Speaker 4:You know, coming into, I mean, even a building like this, for example, that is, you know, you know workspaces have been around as a company for many years. Their spaces used to be very bland Sorry, workspace, but you know, in terms of, there was, you know, a very bland product. It's actually they've understood that and so actually we're gonna create spaces that people you know really want to go to, providing either service podcast suites or or gyms or or by providing Good quality space that it actually is designed, led, and that's where I think this work near home product and offering Is got huge potential. But you have to get the right product after walking and go, do you know what I want to work here, as opposed to working at home on my kitchen table or jumping on a train?
Speaker 1:Yeah, do you work from home.
Speaker 4:I work from home have. I've so 20 effective run my business about my own visit for 21 years and I've worked from home 1890% of time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:I do work from home.
Speaker 1:I only go Interested yeah, well it's it's a.
Speaker 4:It's a funny. I think I'm very fortunate that I've. We bought a new house six, seven, eight years ago and it had a room of the garage. It was my daughter's and son's playroom that during COVID I commandeered and said this is gonna be my office. That's gonna be a proper office.
Speaker 4:I'm gonna have, you know, paint it and do stuff. All of a sudden made it into my space that I feel comfortable in and working in. But the fact that I can jump on a train and be in London in 50 minutes is a dream is a dream, it's, and it's so Because I can be in and out as quickly or as easily as I want. I booked normally Tuesdays and Thursdays in London or in Manchester or Sheffield or something, so I'm I'm constantly on the move or just traveling around.
Speaker 1:So it's yeah so it's like operators need to have think about Accessibility, like affordability for people, because I suppose if you're fortunate enough to have an office at home, then Maybe you'll find working from home, but a lot of people I'm most people don't, and what's your experience of that? That's absolutely key, that's the problem.
Speaker 4:You're gonna have to get a few people out of the kitchen stuff. People don't want to work in the kitchen, they don't want to work on the sofa. They need we humans need interaction. We know that, that we are an animal that needs action we can withdraw into, and some people can't work from home, some people can't work by themselves, and I appreciate that completely.
Speaker 1:Literally, can't I go mad.
Speaker 4:Yeah, but that's it, and, and, and. That's. That's great, and that take, and that's why we're all so different, that's why the?
Speaker 4:whole great thing about this is. But it's just that if you're gonna get people out, it's got to be affordable. I use the coffee analogy. So I often use the coffee analogy. Let's say they have two coffees a day. I'm not a coffee person. I drink coffee but I'm not a coffee person. Two coffees a day, four pounds of coffee, that's eight pounds a day. They say they do that five days a week. That's 40 pounds. Five is 40. Yeah, and then time that by four weeks in a month.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I'm 16 160 pounds a month. Well, some of these workspaces for drop-in, for desks, etc. Are running at 100 120 pounds, maybe 100, 60, maybe 190 pounds a month. Yeah, including free coffee. Yeah, so all of a sudden, that coffee you're spending by going out and buying it, you know, unless you're making it home, okay. So I think it's a, and I use that one just for people to be able to say do you know what you can actually get really affordable cracking workspace for the price for your coffee a month and you get all the benefits of Community and health and benefits.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I do agree. I have to say for me personally, I find that I I'm a chatter and when I go into the office I because I haven't seen people for so long that I actually find it quite hard to work. I all I want to do is chat and catch up same and I have to help from home.
Speaker 1:All I do is chat and the same.
Speaker 3:Yeah, my best work is done at home, but my most fun work is done in the office and Understanding that work isn't just about production and that there's like a person behind every job that's been delivered and that person is entitled to feel like a person and isolation is criminal, I guess in some respects right, especially if it's forced isolation. So I find it hard. I'm extroverted, naturally. I understand that a lot of people aren't, but in the same regard I I don't actively pursue going into the office still, and that's because our office hasn't yet taken the initiative, I think, to dedicate itself to a new work age.
Speaker 4:It's still got one foot in each door and so there's like that's a bit, but I think that's gonna take time and I think a lot of people that sit there, there's a lot of agents, there's a lot of property people that sit there and I say we must be in the office. Everybody has to be in the office five days a week. It's failed, the great experience failed, et cetera. Well, I think it's a lot of rubbish and the problem is it's gonna take 10 to 20 years, in my opinion, for businesses to understand not business, but for property owners as well business to understand how they work, also how the individual works, and that's the problem. The biggest problem we're going to have is that individuals were, we were sheep penned into a room.
Speaker 4:If you're gonna work in an office, you have to work in an office. You had to go and do it, whether you were introverted, extroverted you know, you had to go and do it, so therefore, it was expected. Now, all of a sudden, pandora's box for a better phrase is open and there's all sorts of different ways of working. Different people can be different people and how they want to be, and for businesses to get that balancing act it's almost impossible. In my opinion.
Speaker 3:I agree, I completely agree. I mean I've got a really fortunate. My director is really hands off, right, so he trusts that he's hired people that he can ensure will do their job and he doesn't have to micromanage them and so, as a result, I don't feel like I'm being watched, for example, but I have a lot of friends and colleagues that are like, held, I would feel that, yeah, I would yeah, and I have a lot of friends and colleagues that are held accountable to that little green circle on teams and whether they've wiggled their mouths in the next 10.
Speaker 3:And then, really, although they're at home, they're very much still in an office environment because they're being watched. See, I haven't.
Speaker 4:I didn't even know that was a thing. Well, I knew that was a thing, but you know for me obviously I've never experienced that Obviously different generation in terms of work as well. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But that's so. It's like, why aren't you online, like you haven't you know?
Speaker 1:It's just so silly though because it's all about output the other day, isn't it?
Speaker 4:That's it. It's the form of measurement. The form of measurement is to see the green light come on. That amasses me. Moved, then that's a very poor form of measurement. But it's that production. And going back to the first comment about leaving the office at five o'clock on, Friday work doesn't end necessarily. Just because you haven't worked between the hours of 8.30 and 5.30, because you went to watch your children play sports or you went to the gym doesn't mean that you're not working later or and if those boundaries aren't there.
Speaker 4:But that's the problem. How do you measure output?
Speaker 3:Well, so is there something to be said about efficiency and about, like, if you hire good people, they will do generally do the tasks quicker, and then are they entitled to then win back some of their time for having done tasks quicker than is expected? I think there's also.
Speaker 4:That was funny enough. That was a point brought up about commuting as well. Who owns those commuting hours? If all of a sudden, you're not traveling two hours a day to come into somewhere. Who owns that? Does the owner, does the person employ it? The employee or the employer own those hours? Yeah?
Speaker 3:and then how do you spend them? And like how much does that mean to you? Because I have friends that will commute an extra hour or two to earn X amount more and I'm like, okay, but if you actually divide the extra, travel hours down you're actually earning now less per hour for like a figure that is higher.
Speaker 3:But, yeah, I completely agree. But this again comes back to mixed developments, right? So if you start putting work in where people live, people have the option to commute and like, I'm not just talking about coffee shops, right, you know what I mean.
Speaker 4:I'm not just talking about yeah, do you know what I mean? I don't like the tick box process. No, we all see that. We all see, especially in buildings now. Have we got a cafe tick, yes. Have we got a receptionist tick? Have we got a gym tick? Are we doing anything with them?
Speaker 3:Nope. So I guess also this comes back to one of your point when you asked the question about heritage right. Of a place in industry heritage.
Speaker 3:So I think it's incredibly important to hold on to the aspect of heritage in a community, because that's identity right and identity curates community, and I think quite often we're advising clients to really consider spaces that they put in to be geared towards industries that have historically been there, and we're referencing industries and historic environments in every aspect of design. When we push a design Like you can't, it's incredibly inconsiderate and ill-informed to put something without considering its context as in like you can't open up.
Speaker 3:McDonald's in the middle of you know what I mean. It's rubbish. But I do think that when you look at heritage and you go to make proposals or you go to understand a community, then you absolutely should be drawing on what's been there in the past.
Speaker 1:Like it's-. Can you give an example?
Speaker 3:I can. I'm trying to think about what I can say. So I'm currently looking at converting a town hall, a very historic town hall. It's grade two star listed, currently owned publicly, and they're looking to privatize it and that is basically because they can't afford the upkeep of this building. It's so old that it's falling apart and it's leaking, and they repaired one leak and it costs like a quarter of a million. So they're like basically looking for ways to give this building back to the community and to privatize elements of its revenue to pay for its upkeep in the process. So what do you do when you're holding like one of the main treasures of a community, like a town hall? Right, like the amount of heritage, tradition, memories, like we have people telling us about their school discos there, like 50, 60 year old men telling me about their first dancer school.
Speaker 4:You look to be, then yeah but no, you look straight to be then. I mean.
Speaker 3:I didn't mean to, but yeah, so that you end up looking like so there's all of these romantic memories as well, tied to these places. And then you say, okay, well, how do we unlock this further for the community and ensure this building? Like? I'm of a historic belief that a historic building is only as important as the community that value it. So, although I really appreciate great craftsmanship, I'm not thinking necessarily about the craftsmanship of the building. I'm thinking about all of those people that have the memory of their school dance there. That's far more important to me than how ornate the ceilings are. I'm not looking to take the ceilings away, but that you know that these memories are actually what makes this building important, not the ceilings. And so it's very hard to then privatize a part of a community asset like that, because there's also people like Trumbonists and stuff like that that have their weekly recycles in there. So still active use. So yeah, for me, the conserving of the heritage is continuing to allow the community to use the asset. So the whole point of preserving.
Speaker 1:It's got to be a co-working space. Yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 3:So you have all these council chambers and town hall. They're only as important as how often the community gets to use it, and then the embedment in the memory is what makes them important. So you just have to ensure that they're operational and allowing as many people as possible to get into these buildings. That's what I think makes them important.
Speaker 4:I think you're exactly right. But the last bit you said allowing people into buildings to me is the biggest point. We build things like the shard and people can't get into it. They can look at it and go. This is fantastic, but I'd love to go and see it, or I'd love to go and be in it, and I think the buildings in this country, well, in most countries. But there is another them aspect to it.
Speaker 4:And people will look at large houses, for example, so I'd love to see inside that, et cetera. Now, of course, that's difficult to do, allowing access where especially when we go back to stakeholders and how they work councils have got a very big job to provide not only money making space but also community space that allows the trombonist and their band to go on practice but also allows people to work in good quality space and make money from. The company make money and also the council make money, and I think that's a balancing act that's incredibly difficult to do.
Speaker 4:Governments change every four, five years or they change every day at the moment in terms of prime ministers and immigration ministers, everything else. But I think there's a bigger picture that if we can, if everybody can get together and that probably comes from local government then there is something that can work. But as yet nobody's found the yeah. Well, I'm trying, yeah.
Speaker 3:We were just in this one town hall. It's like okay. So I mean for me that's the part that brings my job alive, like that's the really exciting part. It's hearing about the importance from a community, how important this building is and then being trusted with it. It's like that's really special and it's like it's not just the expensiveness of the building, it's like craftsmanship, how impressive it is from the protected facades from out the front. It's the fact that all of these people link it to all of these memories.
Speaker 3:It is a huge privilege and it's a real balancing act, especially when it's held hostage, like you were saying by political cycles and there's so much politics and like historic politics tied up to these buildings, but there is no clear cut answer, right? So someone? Unfortunately, there is no answer when it comes to these buildings for everyone to benefit all the time from it, so what I personally aimed to achieve is to have as many people benefit from it. So, some people are always gonna lose out. That's unfortunately the way of supply and demand. But yeah, let's just aim for it being treasured by as many people as possible.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so do operators think about the heritage.
Speaker 4:Funny enough, I was thinking exactly when you were talking about Town Hall. There's one in an operator, a client of mine, booty workplace company that have just done Holborn Town Hall Okay.
Speaker 3:I love it.
Speaker 4:But obviously it's a private enterprise, so it's making money et cetera. But they have taken the aspects of that Town Hall as a courtroom, for example, that is now a full co-working space and you can hire out, you know, exhibition space, whatever else.
Speaker 4:So they're, and they are able to understand how those buildings work, not just in the community but also for their occupiers. And an operator that comes in that looks at a build well, doesn't look at a building and just puts us straightforward and there are operators that do it just puts a straightforward, you know, cookie cutter approach. This is the fit-out we're gonna do, because we've done it elsewhere and without understanding the community, the element, the building itself, whatever comes with it. That, to me, is very old school. It's very dangerous. You know you end up risking the opportunity for the business to be progressive and work, but also puts pressure then on the operator and then the owner. Ultimately, who's done the least with them or has put aside a partnership agreement.
Speaker 4:So my role in particular when I work for property owners, is to understand the asset, understand the local community, understand what the drivers are, not just for the owner but also for that local area and for the building, and then be able to match that with the operator or operators to say, look, these guys would understand what you've got, what, how important this building is, and also understand what your drivers are, because you're trying to make money from this, and then be able to put the two together. That's my role really. It's not about just opening up the door and saying you know, I like it, it's a car sales woman, car dealerships. You know there's a lot of talk in the marketplace about Flexwork's base being saturated. There's so many. In short, surely it's saturated.
Speaker 4:Well, if you had a hundred car dealerships on a street doesn't mean that it's saturated, because every car dealership offers different price points, different products, different engine size, different quality, different luxury, et cetera. And that's the same with Flexwork's base, and it's. If you come to me and say, look, well, I'm looking for a family estate and I start showing you Ferraris and start showing you, you know, minis and bits and pieces, you'll turn around and say, well, you don't get me at all. You don't get what I'm trying to get from this space. So ultimately it's down to what those occupiers want or those owners want, but also occupiers as well and be able to put the right Flexwork office operator into the space that understand all those drivers.
Speaker 3:So, would you say, will you deal mainly with, like the human connection part there.
Speaker 4:Do you know what I think I'd love to say? I do. Of course, but I don't because, well, I know, actually I do. I do in some respects because a lot of it is some of it. For example, if somebody's got a building and they're looking to drive the most income from it, that's slightly different, because you're then trying to put the operator in with them, just gonna make them the most money.
Speaker 4:Because they understand the product and the service, but, conversely, when you're dealing with an asset that has a small element, they want to put some flex into, because they want to not only give those occupiers, you know, the space that they want, but they provide that community, provide that facility to work together, to play together, to talk together, whatever else it is in co-working or whatever, however it comes around.
Speaker 4:That is exciting. That's really exciting, because then you can start seeing people come around and say, well, actually, this is how I want to utilize this space, this is how I want to consume it, this is what I want to do in it. And you start listening to occupiers and their human element touch I mean, a lot of my work is that I talk about is, ultimately, we have a landlord at the top, property owner at the top, we have an operator in the middle. We then have employers that are taking the agreements. But it's the people, the employees, that the most important people, because actually, especially in today's world, where people will walk and will walk into a space and say I don't like the feel of this, doesn't work, doesn't work for me, doesn't you know the vibe.
Speaker 3:The vibe yeah, Exactly.
Speaker 4:And you know, I always say if I say it's cool then it can't be cool, because I'm that old, it can't be cool anymore. But if people walk into the space and have the vibe and feel the buzz, then all of a sudden you're on the front foot as an employer. So these employers have now got to learn what is important to their employees more and more each day and therefore give them what they want. And that has to start with the real estate element of where they're actually based and what they're utilizing. You know the biofilia element and the drivers of just not having white walls and blue carpet. You know those elements went, they went out. But the biofilia element at the smells, I mean even you know, I know I've got two or three providers that have different smells and fragrances throughout their whole operation whether it's in the Lou area or whether it's you know wherever it is.
Speaker 4:So it's understanding how the human element affects real estate is huge.
Speaker 3:It's because it's almost hospitality, right. It's exactly what it is, and that's where it's gone to.
Speaker 4:And that's so. I think the four walls thing has fallen away. People, real estate or property was the only aspect of a person's business that they didn't want. They had to have an owner's turnaround. I said you, son of a lease, you look after the space, you clean the toilet you change the bulbs, you do everything.
Speaker 4:If you had an IT company that you employed as part of your business and that you had to go and switch on the switch to move IT and then phone them up to say, can you switch on the IT now and do all this, it wouldn't work. But real estate is slowly moving towards that hospitality product and service which is the ultimate end game.
Speaker 4:in my opinion, and if you can make it work, good grief the possibilities are endless for property owners. But the problem is 99% of the UK, especially, is predicated on the old term lease. They bought on yields and lease lengths and et cetera, et cetera, and that's a very different so it was a very different and a difficult corner to turn.
Speaker 3:So it's just too slow to react, I guess, massively slow and it'll take.
Speaker 4:That's why I talk about the 10 to 20 years. That's where it'll come from. It's such a beast and it's been predicated on 200 years of landlords having money, power and telling tenants this is the space. If you want to be in this location, this is the space you have to have. You have to create within that space, because all I'll give you is a bare floor, white walls. You will create your atmosphere. What you think is how your business wants to run or how it wants to feel for employees, but I think that's massively changing.
Speaker 3:But it's kind of hard for businesses to invest that hard in a space when that space might be quite short term. So it's kind of a catch 22, isn't? It. Right, you need. You need a good space, yeah, but you also don't want to have to invest in a space that you may not see, and that's the problem again, and when lease lengths start shortening, that makes it more and more difficult.
Speaker 4:So, therefore, you don't do as much to it and you maybe just put the tick boxes of biofilia and whatever else it is, because they could be removed. So, you know, when Google invests a million pounds on building a land scraper at King's Cross that's a million square feet they understand that they're creating space that is there for the long term. Whether it be too small now, too big now, who knows? Yeah, but they are creating an environment and a community within a building that represents their values and what they think their employees values are and how they want to work.
Speaker 3:We have. I have a really major client I have well, astrazeneca in Macclesfield and this kind of is where they do some of their development and production of drugs and it's responsible for 1% of the UK's GDP. This like little side.
Speaker 4:Wow, it's absolutely huge, wow.
Speaker 3:And as a result? How many?
Speaker 1:square feet.
Speaker 3:Sorry, I don't know off the top of my head but, like, what I was going to say is like they. It's true, it gets visited by like political figures and stuff like that. I'm hoping that I can say this About that.
Speaker 4:I was just wondering, astrazeneca might not be thanking you. Yeah, when you said Macclesfield, you meant Mansfield.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I haven't said anything that I don't think is public knowledge, but they they're again. You get a firm like that and they're becoming incredibly progressive and they're looking to invest, and I think, in the way that the tech companies have, I think other really lucrative companies now are going to start to like really settle into plots and lock in that culture, and so it comes down to a bit of branding as well, doesn't it? And it's like what do you want your brand to stand for and how do you physically represent that?
Speaker 4:Well, B Corp was the big thing.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 4:In the Flexwork Space industry, the first guy that got the operation. They got B Corp yeah.
Speaker 1:Who was it? I think it was the Huckle Tree. It was X and Y. Oh, it was X and Y. It was X and Y.
Speaker 4:They got the first one. I think Rupert will thank me for saying it, but it's. But now there are a dozen, maybe two dozen, and actually I've had operators saying to me I'm already doing this, should I be B Corp? I was like yeah, yeah, yeah. But that to me now is becoming a tick box. Yes, and therefore it's when occupiers will start realizing what the values that these companies bring, that they will align themselves with that brand yes, you know.
Speaker 4:And then be able to say, actually I go with them because they do this, because they're forthright, and X and Y Huckle Tree are very good examples of this, of why people want to go and work with, as opposed to just going to a service office and sitting down and saying it's an office, that's all I need and it's in this location.
Speaker 3:That's it's going to be. Will you vote, don't you, with your money basically every day, the way that you spend it and like, and if you?
Speaker 4:resent it. It must be, must be difficult.
Speaker 3:Yes, Exactly right.
Speaker 4:I'm paying for this but actually it gives me nothing.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, unless it's cheap.
Speaker 4:I mean that's, and that's one of the arguments I have is that's where we, if you look at and we talk about the hospitality, we talk about hotelification in ours, I think the retailification going back to what I said earlier is as important because if you look at the retail market, if you talk about how they work in good and bad times, is that if you either sell really cheap look at Primark, et cetera and Poundland and people like that or really expensive and high in luxury products look at Walk Down Bond Street you know that's not really affected by the retail ups and downs.
Speaker 4:But those middle tiers, those Burton's, you know Nex, et cetera, new Looks all get squeezed when times get hard. Yeah, and the same thing will happen in the office sector, the workspace sector, is that you know the premium product will always sell, the cheap product will always sell. And if you're in that middle tier and you're not offering something that gives either the employee or the employee something that's a bit different or what they want as a community, et cetera, et cetera, and you're charging middle tier prices, you will be squeezed out.
Speaker 1:The last bit that I just wanted to kind of cover, and maybe quite quickly, is the kind of aspect of nature and maybe sustainability a little bit. How does the sort of surrounding natural landscape affect the design process? Does it need to be thought about like what happens?
Speaker 3:So again, there's two ways that I'm thinking about natural landscape.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:One is community. What does? This landscape mean to the community, which I don't want to go into because I've gone into a lot. But the second would be biodiversity net gain.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So we want to understand the quality of the habitat that's been provided by that community and we want to ensure, if we're disrupting that, that we are definitely providing something of better quality as a result. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And that is kind of in the legislation now, but it's something that my team has practiced for a long time. That's like one of our things. That is a reason that I love doing my job and love being a part of it, because it's responsible in that way. It involves full ecological reports. It involves watching the sites over many months. It's not cheap to do, but it is absolutely vital and the more kind of rigorous the testing is and the more that money is invested, the better the output will be as a result for the planet at the end of the day.
Speaker 3:We're finding a lot that clients that are looking to propose are looking to like rewild large parts of their site as a bid to like kind of increase biodiversity. But yeah, I just think that it absolutely has to be considered now. Absolutely. The days have been like oh well, there's a tree that has just cut it down.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Kind of behind us or saying, oh, I know there's like a badger at the head, but like can it not? Live somewhere else. Yeah, it's really sad, right, but this is kind of the reality of what construction money, it's all built.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and that's the problem. It's like, ok, that badger living there could cost the client like a million pounds. And it's like, well, can the badger move? And it's like, not anymore, the badger that's the badger owns that land and you're renting it off the badger. So it really does take a long time for people to fully appreciate how strict it should be. But there are ways around all these things. You can offset stuff like that. But it's not as morally correct to kind of play the system. It's kind of like carbon credits, do you know?
Speaker 3:how everyone's like we're going to promise we're going to deliver carbon and all they do is buy a carbon credits of other people. So we really, really advise against it, because biodiversity is it's kind of nothing that underpins all life on earth, so we have to be really careful of it.
Speaker 1:And I spoke to operators.
Speaker 4:Operators do? I think, going back to your point, it just takes one to start the process. In my opinion, if everybody keeps avoiding it and saying well, actually, money wins, money wins, we'll cut down trees et cetera, and we'll buy some carbon credits because we've done that. These section 106 agreements that we have in planning, they're very much community led.
Speaker 4:Are they going to change and start changing towards nature led, et cetera or whatever else, and I think we've it takes one company, one big company or big big council or whatever it is, just really stand up and say you know what? This is what we're doing, this is why we're doing it, and we understand the basis of what we're trying to achieve and what people want. And if they can do it and people start going there and they have a choice to go there, it'll become popular and become and then ultimately, because it'll start raising more money or it'll start the income will start getting greater. So I think you know it takes one to do it and then somebody else will have to back off. You know it's like electric cars. We talked about electric cars for years and nobody made them and then Elon Musk said look, we're not going to paint in this, this is open in the market, and it opened the floodgates and that's, I think it just it's a very difficult thing to do Of course there's money.
Speaker 4:Money drives all this, any development money drives it.
Speaker 3:But it's kind of. It's also a kind of a hard, because the clients pay me to be there, right, and then I'm telling the client you can't make money off this. So it's a kind of tricky conversation, but it is one that absolutely has to happen. It's like what's the alternative? That we just keep chopping, producing? Yeah, and it's the same with us.
Speaker 1:you know we obviously dealing with these really short leases and they're getting shorter and every time, you know, client says we'll rip the whole thing out and we'll go again and they want brand new furniture, brand new tables, brand like you know carpets.
Speaker 1:We did an earlier episode on circular economy offices and we had a wonderful woman called Agostina who basically gives carpet tiles new life. And the carpet tiles that go into these offices will have been there for a year and the you know the new tenant comes in and they're like we want brand new carpets, we don't like this color, it doesn't go with the design and those carpets just go in landfill and they could last for 15, 20 years. Anyway so this woman? She takes them all the carpets, and puts them into social housing.
Speaker 4:It's an amazing initiative, yeah, and I think we'll see more and more of that.
Speaker 4:I mean, we're starting to see there's an operator that's just about to sign their first deal. As I understand it, that is predicating the whole their business on that, on the idea that the carbon footprint is everything and they will measure daily, weekly, the impact they have. And you know there's going to be more and more operators doing this. But again it takes one to start the process. It is saying, actually, what we'll do in terms of where we can rehouse as much as we possibly can, but they'll diarise it and they'll make it public domain. So you can then sit there and suppose saying, yeah, we got rid of those carpet tiles to social housing. No, no, no, this social housing, this building, has our carpet tiles. In this time we square feet, we did, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 3:I guess one point that's often overlooked is that people forget that the greenest building is a building that's already built and like there's just. That's also a kind of quite a hard sell to a client to be like I know that you want to rip this building down.
Speaker 3:It maybe isn't exactly what you hoped for, but in doing that you're unlocking all that carbon that wants is trapped in that building and then replacing it with a whole another building, and the average building lifespan today is 60 years, right, so we expect every building we've built today to last about 60 years.
Speaker 1:That doesn't feel like very long, it isn't? It really isn't.
Speaker 4:Not when you talk about your town halls. Yeah, exactly A little bit, around 200 years.
Speaker 3:So, like, these buildings that have been around here for like over a hundred years are the most green buildings because they've lived so long right and the carvins have been trapped for so long and I think there's a little bit of greenwashing that goes in with saying, oh, our building is incredibly efficient.
Speaker 3:It's like okay, but you did just build it last year and that is a huge amount of carbon that you've invested in that building. I appreciate now that it's going to run, but that kind of should just be obvious, right, but these buildings are existing building stock. We should be like really proud and like look to.
Speaker 4:Look to the exit. Do you think EPC pressures are going to change that? People are looking at buildings, going. Oh God, to turn it from a D to a C is going to cost me X. Why not just knock it down? So therefore it almost goes against the whole I know right.
Speaker 4:How it all sits there. It's almost a and we're definitely seeing that, but people are sitting there saying we can't change this from a D to a C without spending X millions. We may as well spend X million plus knocking it down and going around that way, so it almost becomes a.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's the two draw them. It's following the tail, Is it? Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 3:I do completely understand what you're saying. I hope not. I've got it. So I can sleep tonight, but I hope not. Sorry, I really do wish that people would just Just. If there's anything from this that you take away from me, it's to understand that the greenest building is one that's already built. That's like just. If your parents are thinking about knocking down their home or your neighbor wants to like extend and rip up a bunch of stuff, just remind them that there's a lot of carbon trapped in all of that that they are Extensions?
Speaker 4:all right Extensions. Okay, it's not too bad, it depends, it depends right.
Speaker 3:I'm thinking about the major, yeah, the kind of ones that I get involved doing I guess, yeah, but yeah, don't pick your neighbors.
Speaker 4:No, I'm sorry if you're not an exemption.
Speaker 1:So you can connect with both Harry and Will on LinkedIn. Their links will be in the show notes below, and this is the end of the series. So join us for series two. Don't know what it's going to be about could be anything. Yeah, thank you so much. See you next time. This podcast is sponsored by Projects, the home for better business, the two beautiful buildings open in the heart of Brighton one in the lanes and one moment from the beach, plus many more set to open across the UK. Projects is proud to house a community of collaborative businesses. They change and operate inspiring spaces that make everyone feel included. Projects combines co-working areas, dedicated desks and fully serviced offices with meeting and event spaces, cafes, bars and a gym. And this podcast suite. Find out more, look at all and arrange a free trial via their website, wwwprojectsclubcouk. Plus, you can let them know that you've heard about them via the spaces that shape us to receive 25% off your first podcast suite booking.
