Trust, regeneration and the transformation of King’s Cross - London | Nick Searl #267

Sharing your experience from such a long career and, and, and also history of working with those big projects, could you tell us a bit more about role of Argent or Related Argent after? Could you define, is that, um, a developer or maybe an investor? How such a player ca- can influence city making and, and urban regeneration as such?

I, I'm gonna make a slightly glib response to that in the sense that you've got to want to do that, first and foremost.

Um, I think, you know, the world over, property developers often have, and real estate developers have often got themselves a pretty bad name, and they've got that reputation, um, deservedly because they haven't behaved well, and they've seen the city, and they've seen, um, real estate simply as an, an opportunity to make, make money.

And don't get me wrong, there's absolutely nothing wrong with making money in real estate.

But particularly when you're ler- working at a very large scale in cities, I think you have an obligation to really think about the impact of what you're doing, and y- you kind of Have the opportunity to either have a very positive or indeed a very negative impact upon the city where you're working.

And that's not about being good or bad, it's just about being thoughtful about how you go about your business.

So, you know, I, I had worked in businesses where I didn't feel there was much thought outside of the building itself and the profitability of that building, and frankly, the leadership didn't really care very much about what went on around the building, didn't care very much about any retail or amenity type space.

They were just interested in how do I drive a tenant to pay good rent in my building.

When I joined Argent, I found a completely different mindset, a mindset that said, let's create value through the place, and that's both social value and economic value, and through driving that value in the early stages of a project, and that's investing into public spaces, it's investing into activation, it's investing into the narrative around the place that you share with, with the people of the city to explain what you're doing.

You ultimately can drive out performance from an economic perspective because you create, you create demand and you create the desire of, of people to want to come to the place that you've, that you've delivered.

So, A, you've got to want to do it, and B, you've got to be really thoughtful about what it is that you're doing and how you're, how you're going about it.

I think extremely important thing here is creating the value, also the social value, and not squeezing out the, the square meters and, and maximization of the, of the profit.

This is definitely something that I think Poland and Polish cities are struggling with.

So you go after, yeah, the maximum profit basically, and you provide units that are extremely small, so you can squeeze out as much as you can, as much profit as you can.

And I feel like that's been the problem since I remember for, for ten, 15 years, maybe even more.

And I feel like slowly there is this awakening that people start to demand quality and demand that developers, investors, they give something back.

How did it work in the example of King's Cross? And maybe you could also share overall the story behind the project.