Thanks very much, Martin. I’m also chairing Design Council Cabe. Cabe merged into and is now part of the Design Council as of 1st April and I think, in some ways, it was a historic moment where the silos between architecture and design related to construction and other forms of design, those silos are, I think, now starting to erode and it’s the first time, I think, we’ve been in a position as a country where there is a kind of view about the design which is really that it can go from the teaspoon to the city.
Delighted to be here. I am an Apple user and I do drive a Jaguar and I was thinking, I wish I’d had batteries when I had my old Jaguar Sovereign because if I’d had batteries, I’d probably still be driving it but at nine miles to the gallon, it was a little expensive.
Welcome to this final morning or semi-afternoon session of this event. Welcome to the online participants also. Well, we may or may not all be Apple users or Jaguar drivers but we are all consumers of the built environment and in some ways, we’re all experts in the built environment because we know what our own experience is of it. And the built environment; towns, cities, places, spaces, buildings, is of course the context within which most of our future growth, physical growth, will take place.
And the question is, how can design make those contexts appetising? How can design help to give them long life, loose fit, low energy including in relation to retrofit? And how can design help to generate or regenerate places and, just as important, community life in those places, in the many different forms in which communities exist.
We’ve got three contributors who are going to give us ten minutes each. I shall be quite strict about that, chaps. And then we will have contributions from the floor and at 1:00 pm at the very latest we will have a summary contribution from Richard McCarthy, who’s the Director-General at communities and local government who facilitated the move of Cabe into the Design Council and have given us a bit of funding for our first two years, for which we’re hugely grateful.
Our three contributors, firstly Jim Eyre of the architects Wilkinson Eyre, double Sterling Prize winners, amongst other things; then Kevin McCloud, man of parts, an architect by training but, of course, best known as a broadcaster but now also a client; and then finally Andy Altman, who’s going to bring kind of transit… or is bringing transatlantic vigour to the hugely important task of delivering the Olympic legacy and a huge housing and regeneration programme in East London.
But to kick us off, please welcome Jim Eyre.