1.    Places that host the world 

There is a special vibration in places that have hosted the world. At contests, events, exhibition, global moments, or through significant breakthroughs and discoveries, where there are global dimensions or audiences involved, the meaning of place is amplified. The echoes of a gathering of global significance project a quality of epic import. Hosting can produce a future of outsized expectations, and enable a level of ambition beyond the normal cycles of change. 

A geo-political summit, a great discovery, the end of a war, or the hosting of a great sporting event, can be the trigger for a place to redefine its meaning within larger contexts and bigger geographies, and with higher expectations than is otherwise possible. This is because the whole world has somehow borne witness to a catalyst of change. That place becomes ‘anointed’ for deeper meaning, and its progress is followed more keenly. Expectations are raised. 

London has hosted more than its share. The ultimately peaceful transition of the Norman Conquest led to the new charter for The City of London that was agreed at The Guildhall in 1067, and set in train an ‘open city contract’ of ‘live and let live’ between Merchants and Monarch that has lasted almost a thousand years. London is a negotiated city. The Great Fire of London in 1666 became an international story that allowed London to discover, and then promote, its innate regenerative power. 

London  1838 Regents Park & Bloomsbury 

In a short period at the start of the nineteenth century Bloomsbury was created as a new quarter on what was then a growth edge of London. Regent’s Park’s inner circle  was designed in 1838 and then opened to the public.  It became one of London’s great parks with one of the world's great scientific establishments at its heart; the London Zoo. 

George Birkbeck founded something called the Mechanics Institute so that working class men and women could study in the evenings. It became Birkbeck College, one of the world's great institutions for adult learning.  

Jeremy Bentham and his cohort founded University College London to be at the radical cutting edge of university teaching and research. Others created the British Museum, St Pancras Station, numerous hospitals, and charitable foundations, that today are world leaders in child health and life sciences.  

London 1851 The Great Exhibition South Kensington 

The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, the first of the great World Expos, gave Britain, and the imperial Queen Victoria, a global prominence and a new kind of soft power which the UK has traded on since. 

The institutions created to host that show of cultural and scientific might (The Albert Hall, The V&A, The Science, and Natural History, Museums, Imperial College) still define the special zone that is South Kensington in London, and reverberate that 1851 moment. 

London 1918 and 1945 The West End 

The final days of World Wars 1 and 2, where the deep angst of war give way to wild celebrations in London’s West End gave it a special recognition as one of the greatest party venues in the world. That fun loving charisma is now revived every Dec 31st as revellers party passionately in our city and its waterfront. 

Six years after the end of WWII, with the UK still in the doldrums, and one hundred years since the Great Exhibition that had endowed South Kensington, the Festival of Britain was inaugurated to restore national pride, provide a ‘tonic’ for people, and to begin the regeneration of the South Bank of the Thames.  The Festival of Britain events covered Science, Art, Technology, and Design and were distributed across the UK with exhibits in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cardiff, Belfast, York, Liverpool, Oxford, Cambridge, and more. 

The first cycle regeneration of London’s South Bank were anchored by The Dome Discovery, the Skylon, and the Royal Festival Hall, and paved the way for subsequent enlargements and expansions to host The National Theatre(s), National Film Theatre (BFI South Bank), Purcell Room, Hayward Gallery, and multiple national orchestras. 

This created a cultural hub south of the river and provided a spur to multiple cycles of waterfront regeneration that were continued and augmented by the Millennium celebrations in 2000.   

London 2012 Stratford 

In our current times, there is one new place that has also acquired this status. A location of special meaning because of the things it has hosted, the audiences that witnessed it, the processes of change that were involved in making it happen, and the shared venture that will now be required to optimise its potential.  

In the summer of 2012, London hosted the XXX Olympiad, including The Olympic and Paralympic Games at the newly minted London Olympic Park (since renamed Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, QEOP), in a district adjacent to Stratford in East London. The zone had been reclaimed from its varied and disparate roles as a Dog Racing Track, a ‘Fridge Mountain’, Breakers Yards, and polluting light industrial uses, to become the stage for the Olympic Games in a modern global city. It came to be the catalyst for a process of wider and deeper reinvention and regeneration that forged a fresh location that hosts key ingredients in London’s future recipe for success. The world came to London in 2012, saw the transformation and ambition, witnessed the great sporting contests, and noted that the place itself, and London more widely, were changed forever. 

Barcelona 1992 Reversing Urban ‘Lock-In’. 

London accepted an inheritance that may come to be seen as an endowment from Barcelona in 1992. 

That is, to use the hosting of the Olympics not simply as means to welcome the world, make physical change happen, and modernise infrastructures, but rather to reorientate a whole city and its spatial systems so that it works differently, and creates new value, as a result. The full reorientation of a city is about reimagining, escaping from several centuries of being locked-in to old spatial models, stimulating and unlocking a new geometry. The aim is to undo a dependency and set a new path. 

In Barcelona, the 1992 Olympic Games gave the post-industrial city an accessible and visitable waterfront that it had not had for 150 years. Factories, logistics, railways, and power stations had separated the city from the sea. Thirty-three years of progressive regeneration and evolution since the 1992 Olympic reset have redefined what Barcelona is, a post-industrial economy where Science, Art, Music, Culture, Dance, Sport and Innovation flourish. 

The first cycles of post-Olympic development in Barcelona were physical, but they are now increasingly social, economic, cultural, environmental, and scientific. The 1992 Olympics were an expression of a self-confident intent to re-make Barcelona. They stretched and redefined the city, creating new capacity and capabilities for wider change. Physical change gave confidence to other transitions.

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