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<\/p>\nIn his trademark baggy trousers and pullover, Thomas Heatherwick, 55, has just cycled back from his \u00a31.3 billion reimagining of London\u2019s grandest exhibition centre at Olympia, Kensington. The trouble with Olympia, he says, is that, \u201cIt\u2019s like the lights were off. Unless you\u2019re going to the cyber security show, [or] the pet food show, with a plastic badge swinging around your neck, it\u2019s dead to you.\u201d <\/p>\n
The place failed the test that Heatherwick \u2014 quoting his friend Tim Smit, cofounder of the Eden Project in Cornwall \u2014 describes as: \u201c\u2018Would you go there on a date?\u2019 It\u2019s a good lens for all public space. Would someone go there just to be there \u2026 without having to have a badge around your neck?\u201d<\/p>\n
He thinks most modern places fail this test. Ninety-nine per cent of the newer bits in any city are simply \u201cboring\u201d, he reckons. Over the past century, a \u201cquiet, global catastrophe\u201d of characterless buildings has left people cold, unhappy and disconnected, he argues in his international Humanise campaign. <\/p>\n
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Heatherwick\u2019s \u00a31.3 billion masterplan for Olympia, west London<\/p>\n
WE ARE NARRATIVE<\/p>\n
Up in his first-floor office, over steaming apple pie in enamel bowls, Heatherwick tells me, his gesticulating hands twirling like windmills: \u201cAs humans I think we are thirsty for places to come together.\u201d We thought the internet \u201cwas this great democratising thing that would allow us to see each other more than ever. But actually it didn\u2019t. The algorithms divided us. People just aligned with each other. It quite often turned toxic. When you\u2019re physically with someone, even if you disagree, there\u2019s a civility because you\u2019re more likely to see that other person\u2019s humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n
The digital revolution means, \u201cYou can work from home, study from home, shop from home, be entertained at home,\u201d he says. \u201cHow amazing. But the shadow of that is we\u2019ve had an epidemic of loneliness.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the past, \u201cYou had to go to work, you had to go to a shop, and you had to go to university,\u201d he continues. \u201cThe streets were alive because we all definitely knew we needed them. Now we need them in a different way. It\u2019s the only place we actually see each other.\u201d<\/p>\n
Physical places \u201cfeel more important than ever\u201d, he reasons. \u201cWe have to deliberately design them to bring us together.\u201d<\/p>\n
Heatherwick races through all this in the first eight minutes of our interview. Then he takes a breath. \u201cSorry to go blasting off,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
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Heatherwick\u2019s Little Island, a public park on the Hudson River in New York City<\/p>\n
ALAMY<\/p>\n
He has a point, though. His message feels particularly prescient with Keir Starmer\u2019s announcement of the building of 12 new towns as he attempts to re-establish his authority with a revival of the postwar building boom.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Keir Starmer wants to reclaim patriotic values by building 12 new towns<\/a><\/p>\n The key question for the next wave of new towns, according to Heatherwick, is: \u201cWould you feel the \u2018go there on a date\u2019 factor?\u201d <\/p>\n For the 32 new towns built after the Second World War and now home to almost three million people, mostly the answer is \u201cno\u201d. Their construction was the most ambitious town-building programme ever undertaken in the UK. Yet only 4 per cent of residents describe their town as \u201cnice\u201d, according to an independent survey of 1,000 people living in the towns for the Humanise campaign. <\/p>\n \u201cOnly 4 per cent,\u201d Heatherwick says. \u201cIt\u2019s shocking, shocking.\u201d <\/p>\n In fact, many surveyed residents spontaneously described their new towns as \u201cboring\u201d, \u201cugly\u201d and \u201crun-down\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cTo make a new town, you need cultural confidence,\u201d Heatherwick says. \u201cMost people do things the same as everyone else, thinking they\u2019re being original, but actually being the same. Cultural confidence is needed to make something wholehearted. That\u2019s missing now. It\u2019s been missing for quite a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n He explains: \u201cIn projects that we work on, one of the things you\u2019re trying to do is make places more particular. You don\u2019t look for the samenesses, you look for the quirks.\u201d <\/p>\n Take Milton Keynes, England\u2019s most successful postwar new town. (It is soon to be \u201crenewed\u201d as one of Labour\u2019s next 12 new towns, the government announced on Sunday.) Heatherwick vividly remembers his father taking him there, aged 11, to see an exhibition on the homes of the future. \u201cThere was a house like a pyramid, harnessing the sun, and they were very seriously trying to look at how something could work better,\u201d he says. \u201cBut when I went back 20 years later, those houses were just subsumed into mediocrity. It was interesting how uninfluential singular projects were.\u201d<\/p>\n Milton Keynes, founded in 1967, is set to be \u201crenewed\u201d as part of Labour\u2019s plans for 12 new towns<\/p>\n ALAMY<\/p>\n \u2022 Forget the concrete cows. Why Milton Keynes is a success, 50 years on<\/a><\/p>\n The designer, who had set up his own studio aged 24, returned to Milton Keynes in the early 2000s to advise on its masterplan as lead artist. \u201cMilton Keynes is famous for its phenomenal grid [of streets],\u201d he says. \u201cBut there were people who wanted to just turn it into ordinary curvy roads. We wanted to lean into, \u2018Let\u2019s make this the squarest city in the world.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n Other cities try to set themselves apart by commissioning single landmark buildings, he adds. \u201cOur logic was, don\u2019t follow [that] pattern.\u201d Milton Keynes needed more car parking, so Heatherwick made an \u201cimpassioned plea\u201d to build four of the \u201cworld\u2019s best car parks\u201d framing the city. <\/p>\n Those car parks were never built and Heatherwick\u2019s tenure in Milton Keynes was short-lived. But his studio \u2014 which now employs more than 250 people \u2014 has gone on to design an undulating neighbourhood in Tokyo and parts of the acclaimed regeneration of King\u2019s Cross. Here, two once derelict Victorian coal warehouses seem to kiss one another above a vibrant shopping district, near his 330m-long tree-topped \u201clandscraper\u201d (longer than the Shard is tall) where Google will open its London headquarters next year. <\/p>\n Heatherwick\u2019s manifesto has been captured in a 500-page Penguin book (now available in 11 languages) and a BBC Radio 4 series (now in its second season). Yet his critics point out a sense of \u201cdo as I say, not as I do\u201d. They cite his expensive Routemaster buses, discontinued to cut costs (and dogged by passenger complaints of being too hot inside), London\u2019s scrapped garden bridge and his New York honeycomb tower, Vessel, which was shut for years after several suicides.<\/p>\n Boris Johnson, then London Mayor, unveiled Heatherwick\u2019s redesigned Routemaster bus in 2010<\/p>\n ALAMY<\/p>\n To this, Heatherwick says: \u201cWell, I\u2019d like to see anyone who hasn\u2019t learnt lots of lessons in a 30-year career. My shoulders are broad enough.\u201d Tellingly, his flops are displayed as prominently as his successes in his studio.<\/p>\n Heatherwick has \u201cconsistently tried to make places that engage people\u201d, he adds. \u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019m controversial. A lot of what we\u2019re doing is based on common sense. It\u2019s more controversial to make more and more soulless places that don\u2019t connect with people.\u201d<\/p>\n Has Heatherwick talked to the government about new towns? Shortly before the election last year, Angela Rayner, who became housing secretary, visited his studio, he admits. <\/p>\n Yet when Labour announced its next wave of new towns, the party promoted it with images of Edwardian-style mansion blocks<\/a> and leafy streets of period-type townhouses. Should new towns look old to be liked?<\/p>\n The Humanise campaign polled the public via Instagram with three imaginary streets created by Heatherwick\u2019s studio:<\/p>\n Only 1 per cent of online respondents preferred the standard modern street with its bland, could-be-anywhere design (option 1). It\u2019s the sort of street that architects would describe as \u201cclean lines, subtle, honest, functional\u201d, Heatherwick declares. \u201cAll words that are apparently flattering. But actually, they\u2019re shorthand for boring.\u201d<\/p>\n Over a third (36 per cent) voted for a curvy, playful street design described as \u201chumanising\u201d (option 2), while two-thirds (63 per cent) favoured a street that closely matches Labour\u2019s period-style vision for new towns (option 3). <\/p>\n Heatherwick is not opposed to historic designs. His own home in north London was designed by Ben Pentreath, the celebrated traditionalist designer of more than 1,000 homes in Poundbury, the King\u2019s neoclassical town in Dorset.<\/p>\n The centre of Poundbury, the King\u2019s neoclassical planned town in Dorset<\/p>\n ALAMY<\/p>\n When I put this to Heatherwick, he says: \u201cI know Ben and he\u2019s actually not obsessed with old-fashioned things.\u201d Rather than faking the past, Pentreath is \u201cborrowing from a language that\u2019s been around and that works\u201d at a functional and a human level.<\/p>\n So what does Heatherwick make of Poundbury, upheld by many as a model for the next new towns? \u201cEverybody laughed at the King when he first suggested [Poundbury],\u201d he says. \u201cThe architectural world turned its nose up massively. The same kinds of architectural critics who originally lampooned it, now suddenly are doing much more nuanced articles about it. How can you argue against somewhere many people really love? I don\u2019t think we have to copy the past, but there\u2019s lots of valuable lessons in Poundbury.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Aerial](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/\/60b32294-5f71-4102-96ee-cb748ffece71.jpg\")
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