David Taylor meets up with Arup CEO and NLA Londoner of the Year for the NLA Awards 2025 Jerome Frost OBE to talk about the ‘inspirational’ London, lessons from the Olympics, the need for speed, and the enduring power of the capital’s built environment eco-system 

 

Hello, Jerome, and congratulations on your award of Londoner of the Year! Could you just put into words for me what London represents to you, both from an Arup perspective and as a person? You touched on it in your speech, personally, but in terms of the ecosystem? 

Yes, from both a personal and professional perspective. First and foremost, personally, London is a place that I feel incredibly bound to, in that it's given me, my family, my parents, etc, a tremendous sense of opportunity, actually, whilst also providing a fabulous place – an inspiring place, actually – for us to live, to grow up, to develop our careers. And that's down to, I think, its diversity, its willingness to accept and explore new ideas, its willingness to accept people from all over the world, a sort of liberal attitude to the way in which we express our ideas, and want to express our ideas. That gives people, a tremendous sense of safety and freedom to explore those ideas and progress them. And that translates, professionally, into a design community that really is willing to push boundaries. A design community that's willing to experiment, knowing that the population of London is quite forgiving, actually. You can make mistakes in London, and citizens will recognise where you've tried and given a given real effort more than perhaps the outcome sometimes, if it hasn't quite gone as planned. And that's really, really important to have an environment like that, particularly for a design community that needs to experiment and needs to have the safety, if you like, to shape and to explore. That is something that very, very, very few cities that I've experienced across the globe have, other than London. And that's also what leads to London's sense of – and I said it in that speech – more than just the urban fabric being the thing we export, or the built fabric being the thing that we export. It's more the way in which we conceive of the spaces around that built fabric and the way in which people live or work or have fun in those spaces. The sense of community coming together with buildings in a very different way than you experience in a lot of other cities around the world. So, when I'm working abroad, more often than not, our clients are somewhat less interested in cookie-cuttering a building or a particular part of London into their city. The architecture, engineering etc, needs to be contextualised for its local environment. But what they are interested in is how you can really define and export the sense of dynamism, the sense of freedom that London does offer, and that relationship between people and buildings that you see so much on London streets working very well. And it's hard to achieve. I think it comes from a philosophy of how we work as a design community together, and this sense of collaboration, this deep sense that you can't just look at a red line and assume that's the boundary to which you work. 

In terms of the world's eyes being on London, you're heavily connoted in my mind with the Olympics and your work in 2012. Can you just give me a few recollections from that period, from then to now, and how you see the future in terms of London's built environment? 

Yes, the Olympics was a really big moment for London, and big moment for Britain actually, in that I think it brought us away from historic stereotypical perceptions of what London represented, or what Britain represented at that time. That might be bearskin hats and marching bands-type stereotypes, much more towards presenting the city, as a contemporary city, willing to engage in the design debate and discussion, but willing to create places. But also energising community, designing for communities who weren't just the wealthy, if you like. 

 It was a real effort through the work that we did on the Olympic Park, to try and integrate very strongly with the communities around the Olympic Park who had real needs, in many different ways.  I remember distinctly, for example, doing community engagement activities where we didn't talk about design at all. We talked about what kind of jobs people wanted and what kind of future opportunities they might want in their careers. And that was just as the Olympics was an inspiring way of having a conversation like that, that people bought into, which is why we got so much community support for the project. When you then stand outside that and look back from another side, another part of the globe, it really stands out as a model for what a major event of that sort can do, and the transformational effect it can have. We very often look at the built transformation. You know that piece of East London, which we should rightly be proud of, but I think it goes much further than that. It changed people's attitudes, their willingness to go for projects at scale and recognise that they can have the effect of changing a city's trajectory. 

Can you foresee us mounting another bid in the future as a city? Perhaps not the Olympics, but something large, which galvanises the construction and design community to a certain deadline? 

Well, we have – in Britain, we have, and, you know, I was in Birmingham yesterday, and I was really still impressed with the legacy that Birmingham's achieved from the Commonwealth Games investment there. I mean, it’s absolutely fantastic. Birmingham city centre is a joy to be part of, to experience, these days. So, Britain is doing that, and has done on a few occasions now. But whether London would do it again? I'm sure London will. London has the boldness and ambition, where it believes it can pull off that kind of scale of change and that kind of scale of event. There's nothing that I'm aware of on the horizon right now, but I think one of the important principles, actually, that underpinned the success of the Games was a determination to build the Games into a very clear, long-term plan for the city. And I think, as we start to gain momentum around the mayor’s plan and round the broader aims, that have been galvanised at the moment in the work that the mayor is doing in London, I think there will become a moment where we want to make a big step change. It might be in housing, or it might be in the development of a particular part of London, but a big, big step change being needed is where an event would really slot in and enable that to happen. Where I've seen events around the world not work so well is where they haven't really had that kind of mandate, if you like. It's not clear, really, what the outcome is that the city is looking for. I think we really were clear in 2012, and that's what made it such a success. 

Two very quick last questions. Firstly, what does this award mean to you personally? And secondly, if you can look into your crystal ball, or at least your wish list for the city, what does London need right now? 

So, it means a huge amount to me. Actually, I'm a very proud Londoner… 

…Enfield? 

 (laughs) Not Enfield. No, I'm not. I was actually brought up in Haringey, and I live in Finsbury Park these days.  My father was from Enfield. 

Sorry! 

That's all right. Still support Spurs, so that's all right! I do like Enfield! No, for me, I feel very proudly London, for all the reasons that I talked about in my speech – but what does it mean? Professionally it perhaps means even more in that I do feel like my entire career has been founded on the opportunities that I've been lucky enough to have, here in London. I've worked in almost every single London borough. I've worked on almost every one of the major urban regeneration projects here. I've worked for the best developers, etc. And being recognised, I suppose, for the very small contribution I've made in all of those different schemes and projects fills me with pride, actually. I only wish my parents, who died quite recently, were here to see that, because my father, at least, also worked in the built environment industry, and he would have been very proud. 

What was he? 

 

He was a quantity surveyor, but he specialised in working on all of the major estate renewal programmes in the 80s and 90s. So, a lot of the London boroughs, etc, that I've worked in were also the boroughs that he was working in at the time, and I spent a lot of time going up and down ladders and standing in the Royal Docks, actually looking at this vast wasteland, and being told by my father that the future was going to be very, very different as Canary Whard started to rise out of the ground. 

Sowed the seed! 

Yes! It sowed the seed, and it was really very inspiring, when I was young. 

So, lastly, that question about what London needs. Firstly, what do you see in your crystal ball? What do you think will happen over the next five years, broadly? And what do you think London needs? 

London needs speed. The development process is stagnating in London. We've seen that over the last few years, for obvious reasons, but it's now become an incredibly difficult and expensive place to develop, which is causing all sorts of problems. I mean, the speed of development is one thing, but the cost of development means we can't get out of the investment coming towards us the extent of contribution that we need to make to the socio-economic outcomes that we want, whether that be social housing, investment in schools, investment in services. There's simply not the margin available in a lot of the schemes that we see coming forward, because it takes too long and because it is too expensive to develop here. So, I would say actually, rather than point to a kind of physical change that we need, we need to change the means by which we are going about planning and developing and designing. The whole process of delivering buildings, delivering parts of our city needs to change. 

You see that pace elsewhere in other cities that you visit? 

Very much so. I talked a little bit in my speech about the import/export origins of London. Sometimes as an industry, we're a bit guilty of exporting more than we import. And right now, when you go around the globe, you can see things happening quicker, and the quality is there. There are some very good examples around the place that I think we need to really listen and look out for and bring into London the way in which we think about development here. 

Fabulous. That's really great. Thanks so much! 

Thank you very much. 

It was an unexpected surprise when I first got the news and a great honour to be receiving this award. 

But…it feels very strange...as all of the work that I have done in London has largely been on behalf of others, many of whom are here this afternoon. 

Whether it is: the Local Authorities: Camden, Hackney, Haringey, Enfield, Southwark, Lambeth, Brent, Tower Hamlets, Newham; the developers: Argent, Lipton Rogers, Quintain, Lendlease, Grosvenor or my brilliant colleagues at the GLA, Olympic Delivery Authority and of course Arup… 

 

It is these people that have truly shaped London for the better and they have given me the opportunity to play a small part in their achievements. 

Both of my parents died recently, causing us as a family to reflect on our origins and heritage … Both of my parents were 18 when they came to London. 

My mother was an Irish nurse who came in the 1950s to work in the Royal Northern - now the Whittington Hospital - which for those of you who don’t know is the hidden jewel of hospitals in London !  

My father came back to Enfield after a childhood in Hong Kong, China, and India. In fact, he had done so much travelling that in later life he got a DNA test to prove that he was of more exotic stock than his parents suggested - it came back telling him he was 100 percent pure Enfield ! 

So, as a family we asked: “are we English or Irish or something more exotic” ? 

Our conclusion was that we were Londoners… we arefrom a place where you can proudly be both Irish, British and anything else you want to be. 

I’m sure many others with mixed heritage feel the same way, because London’s great joy is that it celebrates the diversity of its population, diversity of thinking and ideas, and diversity of design and architecture… like almost no other city in the world. 

And yet, this wasn’t and still isn’t always the case… 

My mother trained herself to develop a plummy English accent to avoid the racist abuse she got when she first arrived. 

Others have had much worse experiences. 

And I think this is something that we as a planning, design and development community must keep reminding ourselves - we can never take London’s great strengths for granted. We need to continuously strive to make sure that the places we design and build create spaces that are encompass new ideas and are welcoming for everybody. 

While I have had the privilege of being involved in lots of brilliant projects that have shaped London, I have perhaps most benefited from being able to export London’s achievements and ideas all over the world. 

Through Arup, I have been able to take London ideas to China, India, Middle East…Germany, New York, Peru…Chile, Singapore, Tokyo and, most recently...Brisbane. 

In doing so, I have been merely emulating our founder the Danish, British…Londoner Sir Ove Arup 

Our company was founded on Ove’s importation of Walter Gropius idea of Total Architecture. Ove gave the philosophy a more pragmatic London spin and re-exported it across the world. Ove argued that to achieve the best outcomes in design you needed a diverse team of people and disciplines working together in equal harmony. 

In addition, in post-war Britain, he argued every project should look beyond the red line and strive for a socially useful outcome beyond its core brief, whilst achieving reasonable prosperity for its owners, and those that delivered it. 

To me, this philosophy underlines some of the best attributes of what has made London a great city and has shaped many of its best projects. 

Importantly, it is these attributes that have also been the reason why London is still the most powerful exporter of design and built environment ideas and services. 

Today in Arup we call it Total Design, but you could just as well call it the London way and we in Arup continue to export the philosophy across the globe. In fact, you could argue that in these times it has as much relevance as it did post-war. 

London is a city founded on import and export. 

As Londoners, we welcome ideas, investment and people from across the globe…we give them a London spin and adopt them in developing our city…and then we re-export them across the world. 

But each time we are not simply exporting shiny glass towers of the City, landscapes and venues of the Olympic Park, stations and tunnels of the Elizabeth Line or the streets, shops and homes of King’s Cross. 

We are exporting London’s unique grasp of the importance of diversity, social usefulness, reasonable prosperity that underpins the mix. This philosophy of curiosity, collaboration and challenge leads to the outcomes of beauty, dynamism and energy of the places created. 

Those outcomes are what my clients across the world want to emulate, not just the architecture. As we used to say on the Olympics...it is not just the look, but the feel of the place that makes it thrive. 

As a community that has benefitted from London’s past, I feel we are collectively charged with ensuring London remains a great place for the future. 

Today, with the wealth divide greater than ever; housing affordability worse than ever; health and education services groaning under the weight of demand and many communities of our city really hurting… 

I feel we are duty bound more than ever to come together, to invite new ideas, challenge ourselves, bring together the huge diversity of disciplines  across the built environment and collaborate to solve the problems the city faces. 

My clients from across the globe tell me London is still one of the best places to invest in in the world…but that it is also one of the slowest and most expensive places to develop. 

This is holding us back. 

As a community in this room, we have the power to collectively address our industry’s pain points, to capture that investment and direct our attentions to tackling the city’s socio-economic challenges. In doing so we will build our city’s future and secure the future export value of our industry.  

The NLA Agenda is seeking to do that and I for one am fully on board. 

I’m so proud to be a Londoner and so grateful to all my family, friends and colleagues in this room for their support in enabling my career here in London. 

Thank you so much for this award, it’s an honour to play a role in shaping London along with you and the many other people who make this city so great.