Victoria – London's newest fashion quarter

London’s newe st fa shion quar ter

the new victorians In 1918 writer and critic Lytton Strachey, a member of the famous Bloomsbury Group, published his book Eminent Victorians. Now, nearly a century later, we approach seven modern-day writers and critics to select people and businesses based in Victoria who qualify for the title Eminent New Victorians in the fields of fashion, design and technology.

contents

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contents

–8– Victoria’s Fashion Quarter: Foreword – 10 – In Residence: Fashion and Design – 12 – Jimmy Choo – 14 – Tom Ford – 16 – Marc Newson – 18 – Burberry – 20 – Phillips de Pury – 22 – Victoria’s Design District: Foreword – 24 – In Residence: Media and Technology – 26 – Telegraph Media Group – 28 – Google – 30 – Gates Foundation – 32 – Channel 4 – 34 – Where: Map – 36 – Who: Street Fashion

contributors

HERMIONE HOBY

PHILL TAYLOR

JONATHAN BELL

Hermione is a Brooklyn-based arts and culture writer and her interviews, features and book and music reviews have appeared in The Guardian, The Observer, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and elsewhere. She studied English at Cambridge and graduated in 2007 with a double first before working on The Observer’s New Review section. She moved to New York in 2010.

Phill is originally from Leicester and moved to London after completing a degree in Photography at Nottingham Trent University.

After his studies, he went on to assist many of the leading names in fashion photography before moving on to work on his own projects.

He has since gone on to work for titles such as i-D, Elle, Marie Claire, Vogue India and Grazia to name but a few. He captures the style of the people who live and work in the Victoria area on page 36.

Jonathan is a writer and editor. Since 2005 he has been Wallpaper* magazine’s architecture editor and he also writes extensively on cars, design and culture. He has written a number of books, including Penthouse Living, Concept Cars, The 21st Century House and The New Modern House: Redefining Functionalism. He lives in South London with his wife and two children.

SIMON DE BURTON

MANSEL FLETCHER

MARIA YACOOB

Simon is a freelance journalist and author who writes about subjects ranging from fine-art auctions to motorcycles for a number of prestigious publications, including the Financial Times and The Daily Telegraph and Vanity Fair. He lives on Dartmoor with his partner Helen, their children Cosmo and Daisy, a springer spaniel called Kip and, he admits, far too many old cars and motorcycles.

He may have started his journalistic career as staff writer on Hip Hop Connection, the original monthly rap magazine, but Mansel discovered that his calling was to write about men’s style. Over the years he’s worked for GQ and Esquire, and contributed to The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian, The Independent and the Financial Times. He is now the features editor at Mr Porter, the online men’s style destination. He remains, however, a big fan of rap music.

Maria honed her writing skills on men’s lifestyle magazine Esquire. Now a freelance journalist, she has penned articles for the Independent on Sunday, GQ, Square Meal and Blueprint.

She has edited magazines for BMW and Moët & Chandon. Maria is also a dance teacher and choreographer, based at Pineapple Studios.

She has worked with the BBC, Sky One’s Got to Dance, and Sadlers Wells.

the new fashion quarter With Burberry’s headquarters now joined by neighbours including Tom Ford and Jimmy Choo, Victoria’s style credentials are growing all the time words: Amy Raphael

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There was a time when Victoria was synonymous with businessmen in monochrome suits dashing to and from their trains. It was a drab transport hub, not a destination district. People rushed through it while barely raising their heads to notice the potential of the architecture.

And if they did bother to raise their heads they’d have seen only unloved buildings.

When more than 5,500 civil servants moved out it was time for change. Victoria, located in the centre of London, is fast becoming a vibrant, dynamic hub populated by some of the biggest names in fashion, design and technology.

Where it was once grey, it is now Technicolor.

Luxury brands, once settled in Mayfair, are moving their teams to the other side of Green Park. Victoria is ideally situated between Bond Street and Sloane Street, two major homes to luxury goods shops in London. It offers better value than Mayfair and offers more space.

Burberry was the first to make the move, back in 2009. Its new neighbours now include Tom Ford, Marc Newson and Jimmy Choo.

The luxury shoemaker now has a spacious 48,000 square feet in 123 Victoria Street in which to strut around. Site-specific design and intelligent buildings that offer sustainable engineering solutions offer fashion houses environmentally positive space to create capacious showrooms. Burberry has even signed up for another 120,000 square feet of space opposite its original HQ in Victoria.

The redevelopment of Victoria is hugely ambitious. 123 Victoria Street, a tired Seventies office and retail property, is being transformed into 200,000-plus square feet of office and retail space. A further 285,000 square feet is being sensitively modernised at 62 Buckingham Gate. If all these figures are slightly dizzying, perhaps it’s easiest to think of it thus: property company Land Securities plans more than two million square feet of redevelopment in Victoria.

The fashion community in SW1 – a group that has been dubbed ‘The New Victorians’ by Land Securities – has joined media HQs such as those of Channel 4 and the Telegraph Media Group, who are now firmly established in the area, as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Google and auctioneer Phillips de Pury. And yet the renaissance of Victoria is not limited to the presence of some of the most prestigious fashion labels in the world. Land Securities is committed to making the area a destination district with new retail and restaurant brands and new public spaces to serve the local community.

Within the next year or two, Victoria will be transformed from an area lost in time to one that is defined by the presence of glamorous fashion houses and creative businesses. The redevelopment will hark back to the glory days when SW1, with its handsome red-brick mansion blocks, was an address to covet. As The New Victorians herald a new era right in the very heart of London, you will no longer want to pass through with your head down.

Amy Raphael is former features editor of Elle and The Face, and now contributes to The Guardian, The Observer and The Times

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in residence: fashion & design

Rebecca May Johnson writes on fashion and beauty for The Telegraph, Monocle and the Financial Times

douglas friedman/trunk archive

1998 and 2004 and its status as a showcase for cutting-edge fashion, was pure gold for the brand. Thanks to the obsessively accessorising Ms Bradshaw and her posse of fashionista friends, Jimmy Choo became a household name on a par with Chanel. In recent years, the brand has found a new fan in the influential form of the Duchess of Cambridge. Kate is in good company, too, with Michelle Obama, Rihanna and Angelina Jolie all devotees, while Beyoncé name-checked the brand in one of her hits.

Choo himself left the company in 2001, and Mellon departed in 2011; but that did not slow the brand’s growth. Driving it forward now are Sandra Choi and Simon Holloway, who brings with him nearly 20 years’ experience at the likes of Narciso Rodriguez, Calvin Klein, Michael Kors and Ralph Lauren. Not content with cornering the market for high-end and daringly high shoes, Jimmy Choo has entered the world of accessories. In 2003, handbags were introduced, so that now Jimmy Choo clutches, too, are de rigeur on the red carpet. The company launched its first fragrance in 2011, and the brand’s portfolio now includes eyewear, belts and scarves, as well as the men’s collection. Among Choi’s and Holloway’s latest projects is a capsule collaboration with contemporary artist Rob Pruitt. And in the digital arena, the new microsite choo247.com, featuring street-style photography, is a way of connecting fans around the world to the brand.

The commercial aspect is as important as ever under current owner Swiss luxury group Labelux. The company is set to expand into the fast-growing markets of Asia and the Middle East, from its glossy new headquarters in London’s Victoria district – the new business hub for forward-looking luxury brands.

jimmy choo

Given its world-renowned status, it is hard to believe that Jimmy Choo is a mere 16 years old. Now, from a new global headquarters in London’s Victoria, the brand has plans to expand even further

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words: Rebecca May Johnson

Since it was founded in 1996, the luxury footwear brand Jimmy Choo has enjoyed a meteoric rise to the kind of global super-brand status that takes others decades to achieve.

For women ‘Jimmy Choos’ has become an alternative expression for ‘fabulous shoes’ – a term like ‘Jacuzzi’ or ‘Hoover’. But this was never a brand to rest on its laurels. Under joint creative directors Sandra Choi, who has been with the company from the beginning, and Simon Holloway, who joined from Michael Kors in 2010, the aim (among other plans) is to make their men’s shoes just as renowned. The third men’s collection, like the mother brand, is notable for its playful updates on classic silhouettes: for example ankle boots in hand-painted psychedelic python. The Hendrix-influenced styles will be on display at Jimmy Choo’s first dedicated men’s store in the Burlington Arcade, Mayfair.

It all began with a Malaysian-born couture shoemaker in London’s East End. Jimmy Choo, who hailed from a long line of cobblers, came to London to attend the Cordwainers school.

His handmade creations garnered a fan base that included celebrities and royals – among them Diana, Princess of Wales – and his fame spread further after a feature in British Vogue by accessories editor Tamara Mellon. At the time, Mellon had ambitions beyond writing about fashion. She spotted a gap in the market: contemporary statement-making shoes, which would set seasonal trends, but were also comfortable. The daughters of women who wore refined footwear by Manolo Blahnik needed a younger, slicker brand to wear.

Mellon and Choo joined forces with Sandra Choi, trained at Central St Martins and working with her uncle Jimmy as chief designer at his couture label from 1993 to 1996, and set about developing relationships with factories in Italy that could develop Choo’s couture process into one that would reach a broader market.

The new brand grew fast. From opening its first store on Motcomb Street in London’s Belgravia in 1997, the label soon had stores in New York, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. As well as stand-alone stores, the company worked hard to establish a wholesale network and by 2001 had more than 100 clients including Harrods, Harvey Nichols and Saks Fifth Avenue. Today it has 140 stores in 32 countries worldwide, as well as being a leader among luxury brands in online retailing, offering the full Jimmy Choo range online, with a strong presence on other sites such as Net-a-Porter (and now Mr Porter).

The team smartly tapped into the visibility that the brand could gain through celebrity endorsements. From the early days, Mellon and Choi would fly over for Oscars season, set up camp in Beverley Hills and cater to the footwear needs of as many stars as possible. They were the first label to offer this service and it paid off as soon every young star worth her salt was hitting the red carpet in a pair of Jimmy Choos.

Then came Sex and The City’s Carrie Bradshaw who, upon opening a box of tissuewrapped Choos, let out a whoop. The phenomenal success of the show between

tom ford

Influential fashion designer, film director, notorious perfectionist – it comes as no surprise that Tom Ford has chosen Victoria as the HQ for his iconic brand words: Hermione Hoby

Tom Ford, a notorious perfectionist commonly regarded as one of the most influential fashion designers of the last decade, is not the sort to leave things to chance, and that includes where to base his company. As the man who turned around Gucci’s fortunes by keeping one eye on its heritage and another on its future, it makes perfect sense that he should have chosen Victoria – the heart of the capital that is known as much for its history and architectural heritage as its global, 21st-century bustle – as the location for the Tom Ford brand headquarters.

But his impeccable London offices are a long way from his beginnings. Thomas Carlyle Ford was born in Texas in 1961 and spent a lot of his childhood on his grandparents’ ranch in the small town of Brownwood. He has said that his glamorous grandmother, ‘very stylish in a very Texan way – everything big and flashy, from her jewellery to her car’, was his first experience of beauty. She instilled in him the importance of being well dressed.

The world of Eighties New York clubbing also fed that appetite for the ‘big and flashy’.

Ford moved there after graduating from high school and enrolled at New York University to study art history but the pull of the city’s nightlife – as well as an early career as a commercials actor and model – became too great and he dropped out in his first year. Partying in Studio 54 and hanging out with Andy Warhol may well have paid off though: the ultra-glamorous evening fashions of that era have been a huge influence on his work.

After a few years working in LA as an actor he returned to New York and enrolled at the Parsons School of Design, studying interior architecture. It was only when he graduated in 1986 that he realised he wanted to work in fashion and he compensated for his lack of

experience with dogged determination. It was by calling sportswear designer Cathy Hardwick every day for a month that he finally got a job on her creative staff. Two years later he moved to Perry Ellis but it was not until 1990, when he went to work for Gucci, that he made his name in the industry. In 1994, a mere four years after he started at the fashion house, he was appointed creative director. At that point the company was in such dire straits that, according to Ford, ‘we didn’t even have a photocopier at one stage, we didn’t have any paper’, but thanks to his sexed-up take on Sixties and Seventies silhouettes, as well as his extraordinary marketing and business nous, the brand’s reputation began to soar along with its profits.

During his 10-year tenure, Gucci’s sales went from around £150m to £2bn. The brand grew to include sportswear, evening wear and home furnishings and eventually acquired Yves Saint Laurent, with Ford appointed the label’s creative director. He has remained unfazed by those within the fashion world who have sniped at his commercialism.

‘Commercial?

Commercial is a compliment,’ he once said. ‘It means it looks great and people want it.’

But in 2009, Ford showed that his ambitions extended far beyond both commercial success and indeed fashion itself. After having described movie-making as ‘the ultimate design project’ and adding that, ‘there is a permanence to film that fashion lacks‘, he made his directing debut with A Single Man, an adaptation of the 1964 Christopher Isherwood novel of the same name. It starred Colin Firth as George Falconer, a middle-aged university professor grieving for his partner of 16 years. Ford, who has been devoted to his partner, fashion journalist Richard Buckley for 26 years, has admitted that the character resembles parts of himself. The film was Oscar-nominated and critically acclaimed, with the Chicago Tribune deeming it ‘subtly heartbreaking’ and ‘meticulously artdirected’. Ford told one interviewer that ‘it was really my midlife crisis on the screen’, but few people’s midlife crises look so exquisite.

In September 2010 Ford made a triumphant return to women’s fashion with an opulent spring/summer 2011 women’s wear collection at an exclusive Manhattan show that is still being talked about. Curated down to the last detail, its models included Beyoncé, Julianne Moore and Daphne Guinness. The clothes, and the event itself, were a testament to Ford’s blend of impeccably tasteful, almost oldfashioned refinement, and his perpetually youthful enthusiasm for sex appeal.

Ford celebrated his 50th birthday last summer and remains as powerful a fashion force as ever. US Vogue editor Anna Wintour, not a woman known to gush, has said she has never worked with anyone, ‘with a greater passion for detail or clearer vision of his aesthetic goals’ and that his ‘persistence and exactitude puts my own to shame. Tom Ford, I realised, was the Flaubert of fashion.’

Hermione Hoby lives in New York and writes for Mr Porter, The Guardian and The Observer

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The work of world-class product designer Marc Newson CBE has taken him around the globe but now the sought-after Australian is happy to call Victoria home words: Nick Compton

‘People ask me what I do and I say I’m a problem solver,’ he says. ‘I’m a gun for hire. People come to me with a problem. It’s not necessarily a big problem, but it’s a problem.’

That first Lockheed Lounge did what it was supposed to do, though. It got him noticed. In 1989, he started working for Teruo Kurosaki’s IDÉE, in Tokyo, producing iconic designs including the Black Hole table. In 1992, Newson moved to Paris, designing products for respected contemporary Italian design brands such as Moroso, Cappellini, Flos and B&B Italia.

But Newson was never going to be happy just designing chairs. He has designed bar and restaurant interiors, including the ones at Lever House, New York’s modernist landmark. He has designed watches for Ikepod, a company he co-founded, shoes for Nike, luggage for Samsonite and clothes for G-Star. One of his latest projects is a camera for Pentax – modern cameras are ugly, and shouldn’t be, he insists.

Newson is a designer concerned with technology and how new technology can be applied in new ways. People have called him a retro-futurist because he wants to make the present look like the future. Or rather the present as it was once imagined, in the most optimistic science fiction, the future we were once promised.

He has worked on concept cars, the Ford 021C and concept jets, the Kelvin40; as well as a design for a commercial spacecraft, the Astrium space jet. He is also the ‘creative director’ of Australian airline Qantas, designing the interiors of its new fleet of A380 Airbuses.

He now lives and works in London with a very swishy pad in Victoria’s Howick Place, also base to the auction house, Philips de Pury.

And he’s a busy chap. According to his own website, his work now accounts for 25 per cent of the total contemporary design market, and he is determined to up that figure, working on projects, big and small.

‘It’s all design,’ he says. ‘I can’t imagine just designing chairs day in and day out, you would get bored. But designing a boat or an aeroplane or even a clock, is essentially the same process: you are working with materials, with processes and with technology, that is what it boils down to. And then it is a question of scale, bigger or smaller. I feel comfortable across all those scales.’

marc newson 16

Nick Compton is features director of Wallpaper*

philip sinden

The designer Marc Newson often wears an expression, behind the beard and long hair, somewhere between embarrassment and wry amusement. He may have always had it but it has more likely grown on him. It is the expression of a man who, and in no way expecting it, finds himself with a peculiar sort of fame. Marc Newson is one of the world’s most famous product designers and the closest design comes to the glamour of, say, Marc Jacobs.

In fact, what with the almost-fame (and the beautiful fashion stylist wife, Charlotte Stockdale) you sometimes have to remind yourself that Newson is also a good designer. A really good designer. It would be hard to find a more beautiful store interior than Newson’s Azzedine Alaia shoe boutique in Paris; all smooth flowing marble and lovely volume, spare and pure…

Just to give one highlight of a long career.

Newson studied jewellery and sculpture at Sydney College of Art but, after being awarded a grant from the Australian Crafts Council, he started hammering and smoothing out a series of blobular aluminium chaises longues. It was furniture that dreamt of being an aeroplane (of the glamorous era before mass transit). He called his design the Lockheed Lounge and in 1986 staged his first show.

Twenty years on, one of the Lockheeds (there are only 15 in existence) sold at Sotheby’s, New York, for a little shy of $1m. It was a sale that announced the arrival of a whole new category of collectable for the super-rich; and so Newson became the poster boy of this push to sell design as art and designers as artists.

‘I can’t say I’m completely unhappy about that sale,’ Newson told me a few years back.

‘But it perhaps put a negative spin on people like me and Ron Arad who had been doing this kind of stuff for a long time.’ (To prove the sale was no freak, in 2010, a Lockheed was sold by Philips de Pury in New York for $2.1m – the highest price paid for a work by a living designer.)

Newson had been producing this sort of experimental design piece in the intervening 20 years, of course. He has a long relationship with the pioneering Gallery kreo in Paris. But that was not what Newson mostly did or does.

He is an avowedly industrial designer; concerned with production and process, how stuff gets made and how you can make it better.

“People ask me what I do and I say, I’m a problemsolver; I’m a gun for hire”

Jason Lloyd Evans

From its expanding base in Victoria, this quintessentially British brand is breaking new ground in fashion and technology around the world words: Mansel Fletcher

burberry

It is extraordinary that 20 years ago Burberrys – as the company was then known – was a byword for fusty old British style. The products had grown old with the customer base, and, aside from selling voluminous raincoats to middle-aged men and women, the company’s main clientele appeared to be the buses of tourists, for whom a stop at Burberrys’ dusty shop was as much a part of a trip to London as buying a Harrods teddy bear.

By stark contrast, in 2012, the brand, now known again as Burberry, is a fashion powerhouse and business success story. From Horseferry House (the Thirties government office in Victoria that, in 2008, was converted into Burberry’s imposing 160,000 sq ft corporate headquarters), the two people at the top of the company, CEO Angela Ahrendts and chief creative officer Christopher Bailey, run a brand that is as famous for its fashion credibility as its unparalleled financial success.

While a 21st-century luxury fashion brand must follow the zeitgeist, it must also be seen to have a soul. That soul is invariably bound up with nationality and one of Bailey’s greatest feats has been to reinforce Burberry’s Britishness, while creating a whole new version of what it means to be young, cool and British. Were he ever to retreat to the clichés of Union Jacks and cream teas the fashion press would accuse him of looking backwards, but by always using young, relatively unknown models, musicians and actors, Bailey maintains his company’s links with the fresh talent that seems to bubble up relentlessly in the UK. Alongside its Britishness, the other thing Burberry is best known for is its selection of

trench coats. Thomas Burberry, who founded the company in 1856, invented gabardine in 1880.

The waterproof yet breathable fabric offered a massive advantage over Burberry’s rivals, and the result was that for decades Burberry was regarded, first and foremost, as a supplier of adventure wear. Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen slept in a tent made of Burberry gabardine during his landmark 1911 expedition to the South Pole, and the company also supplied equipment to the pioneering expeditions of British explorers Captain Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton, and the British climber George Mallory.

However, Burberry’s famous double-breasted raincoats really found their moment in history in 1914, when the British War Office commissioned the company to produce a coat in which a man could go to war. The coat, then known as a ‘Tielocken’, was advertised with a black-and-white sketch of an impeccably dressed young officer looking determined and alert. A century later the advert is still enough to make a man want to buy a trench coat, and while now the coats are slimmer and shorter than the Tielockens of 1914, they remain very similar. Details that were developed for soldiers fighting World War One – epaulettes, wrist gauntlets, a D-ring on the belt and a storm collar – have not changed much, but the manner in which the coats are now advertised and sold has been transformed.

This is because Burberry has been far-sighted technologically. It began to stream its fashion shows in early 2010, inviting fashion bloggers into the shows and allowing online viewers to order handbags as they appeared on the catwalk.

Music from the shows – nurturing young British musical talent is vital to Burberry’s image and a passion of Bailey’s – is available to download from the company’s website, and the brand is represented on around a dozen different internet channels, ranging from YouTube to Chinese language social networking sites. It has also brought the world of high fashion into the everyday lives of its fans, by broadcasting its fashion shows live on big screens in places like Piccadilly Circus and Heathrow Terminal Five.

Asia, too, is a notable focus. Burberry saves some of its most advanced presentations for the continent: an event last year to celebrate the opening of its largest Beijing shop (12,500 sq ft) featured holograms, projections, live models and a performance by the rock band Keane. This spring a similarly lavish Burberry World event took place in Taipei, Taiwan, where guests were surrounded by a 360-degree screen, which drenched umbrella-carrying live models with virtual rain – a suitably 21st-century way of reinforcing the brand’s British origins.

Such events are clearly having the desired effect – in April the company reported £1.3bn of sales over the previous six months – and one result is that Burberry is expanding its headquarters in Victoria by taking over a neighbouring building. A hundred years ago it was Burberry customers like Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen who were conquering the world, now it’s the brand itself.

Mansel Fletcher is features editor at Mr Porter

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phillips de pury 20

daughter. Other shows have featured the work of Mario Testino, Annie Leibovitz and Zaha Hadid.

The Howick Place galleries have helped Phillips de Pury build a reputation for leading the way in running 21st-century art auctions. Its thrice-yearly evening sales of contemporary works attract the most important collectors from around the world who travel to Victoria to bid on blue-chip pieces by the likes of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jeff Koons and Gerhard Richter.

Specialising in five fields – contemporary art, photographs, design, editions and jewellery – the firm has set several world auction records at Howick Place, and the premises have also been used to launch entirely new selling categories such as BRIC (dedicated to art from the emerging nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China) and to specific artworks created during the Eighties.

Despite the modern approach, Phillips de Pury has a decidedly historic background. It can trace its roots back to 1796 and the founding of a small auction house by Harry Phillips, a former clerk of the established auctioneer James Christie. Phillips quickly established himself as a key player on the emerging saleroom scene and was soon holding sales that attracted distinguished collectors of the day, including Napoleon Bonaparte, Marie Antoinette and Beau Brummell.

As with Phillips de Pury, the original Phillips introduced new ways to promote his auctions (‘inventing’ the pre-sale evening reception) and his firm came to be so well regarded among the moneyed collectors of British society that he remains the only auctioneer ever to have held a sale inside Buckingham Palace.

Following its founder’s death in 1840, Phillips continued to grow under the leadership of his son William Augustus, and developed into a network of regional salerooms throughout the UK. In 1999 it was bought by LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault, who subsequently merged the business under former Sotheby’s Europe chairman Simon de Pury and art dealer Daniela Luxembourg.

A decade ago, de Pury and Luxembourg took majority control of the company, shortly after which the name changed to the current Phillips de Pury. Since 2008, the Russian luxury retail group Mercury has owned the majority share.

THE MAN BEHIND THE GAVEL The chairman of Phillips de Pury, Swiss art collector and connoisseur Simon de Pury, is among the world’s most celebrated auctioneers, renowned not only for his expertise but also for his famously flamboyant style at the rostrum. He began his career with Sotheby’s in the Seventies and, within a decade, was charged with the task of opening its new offices in Geneva, which became the world centre of the firm’s jewellery and watch operation. He left his final post there as chairman of Sotheby’s Switzerland in 1997 to establish de Pury and Luxembourg, later Phillips de Pury. Born in Basel, the multilingual de Pury is a baron who rarely uses the title and has wide-ranging collecting interests, including skateboards and novelty coffee mugs. He is also a fan of rap music.

Simon de Burton writes for Vanity Fair, The Telegraph and the Financial Times

hamish brown/countour by getty images

Phillips have been innovative auctioneers since 1796. Under chairman and rap fan Simon de Pury, it has driven the art movement to Victoria words: Simon de Burton

Mayfair and St James’s have long been regarded as prime territory for selling high-end works of art, but in 2008 Victoria began to emerge as the cutting-edge destination of avant-garde collectors for whom the often dusty and sometimes musty world of the traditional galleries held little appeal.

The focus of the move was Phillips de Pury & Company, which broke new ground by moving into the imposing former post office in Howick Place, transforming it into the capital’s first truly modern space for the sale by auction of top quality artworks.

Covering an area of 36,000 square feet, Phillips de Pury’s glittering premises eschew many people’s image of a London auction house: old-fashioned salerooms hiding a warren of corridors and mysterious back rooms.

Instead, the highly regarded art space designer Bill Katz worked with British architects Nissen Adams to create an open-plan, light-flooded layout and winter garden that lends itself perfectly to the sale and display of large, dramatic pieces while also providing perfect entertaining space.

Earlier this year, for example, the building was the location for a cocktail party to announce Fly to Baku, an exhibition of new works by artists from the Azerbaijani capital, hosted by President Aliyev’s

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words: Jonathan Bell

Victoria has undergone various periods of regeneration over the past century.

The changes to the area’s architecture and infrastructure happening right now are arguably the most exciting yet

the new design district

It’s difficult to imagine when looking at the crowded streetscapes that radiate out from its original medieval heart that London was once an agglomeration of villages, often separated by fields and common land. In the case of Victoria, the district owes its genesis to the Victorians – unsurprisingly – and their massive programme of civic renewal and reconstruction. Up until the 18th century, much of the land to the south and west of the Palace of Westminster was open fields and swamps, dotted with barracks, riverside palaces and the odd jail, including the notorious Bridewell prison.

Pimlico began to be developed by Thomas Cubitt in the 1820s. In 1834, the fire at the Palace of Westminster acted as another catalyst for regeneration and reconstruction.

Just three years later, Queen Victoria took up residence in the remodelled Buckingham Palace. Development continued apace and, by 1857, plans were in place for the new railway terminal named after the grand, slum-clearing avenue – Victoria Street – that runs south-west from The Sanctuary.

The new district very quickly garnered a reputation as a centre for engineering firms, a burgeoning industry in Victorian Britain and a legacy of the railway works and other major civic projects. By the Sixties, post-war development had arrived en masse, and the slab-sided cliffs of Westminster City Hall and the three towers of the Dept of Education’s HQ on Marsham Street, cast a pall over the area.

The new century saw Victoria ripe for investment, and the area’s key landowners, including Land Securities, the Grosvenor Estate and Derwent have invested heavily in both new architecture and bringing classics up

to date. Land Securities has used its carefully assembled property portfolio to create several major new developments, starting in 2006 when EPR Architects’ Cardinal Place created a new opening vista to the western end of Victoria Street.

With Transport for London currently overhauling Victoria Station, adding new access routes and escalators and a new ticket hall almost directly beneath Cardinal Place, a new urban landscape is emerging.

Further along the north side of Victoria Street, fresh changes are being wrought in the shape of Kingsgate House, which is actually two new buildings designed by Lynch Architects that will bring apartments and offices together, as part of the social mix of the area. Immediately opposite lie the sleek, geometric façades of 123 Victoria Street, lovingly restored and overhauled for the modern era by Aukett Fitzroy Robinson to become one of Victoria’s most distinctive and desirable addresses.

Almost directly opposite 123 Victoria Street, Pelli Clarke Pelli’s multi-faceted 62 Buckingham Gate is taking shape, a dramatically crystalline new headquarters building above a strip of high-end retail, with an angled façade that will forever banish the memories of the street’s Sixties nadir.

Elsewhere in the district, John McAslan’s residential Wellington House is a new building in the tradition of the grand Victorian mansion block, a sleek Modernist wedge on a prominent axial site, while the ongoing redevelopment of the 5.5-acre Victoria Circle site will see considerable new investment, exciting new architecture and interesting new tenants. Finally, there is Portland House, a striking Sixties period piece that will be thoroughly transformed into one of the area’s most prestigious addresses in the next few years.

All of this development is shaping a new Victoria, and with it are coming new tenants, attracted by the area’s excellent transport links to the West End, the City and beyond, as well as its burgeoning facilities. In 1990, Channel 4 commissioned Richard Rogers to build its new Horseferry Road HQ, marking the start of Victoria’s modern renaissance. C4 was joined by other creative clients, including the Telegraph Media Group in 2005, then Tom Ford and Phillips de Pury at the former sorting office in Howick Place, alongside Marc Newson. In recent years, major offices and HQs have been set up in Victoria by Burberry, LVMH, Links of London, Richemont and Google, while Jimmy Choo, the internationally acclaimed shoe maker, will be one of the headline tenants in 123 Victoria Street.

Modern Victoria is staking a major claim to become one of London’s most dynamic and vibrant districts. With its eclectic mix of historic and contemporary architecture, Victoria has emerged into the modern era as a place of opportunity and innovation, rich in character and diversity.

Jonathan Bell is the architecture editor of Wallpaper* magazine

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in residence: media & technology

design & technology: Telegraph Media Group

It may be more than 150 years old but in terms of new media, as well as traditional investigative journalism, The Telegraph is on pioneering form words: James Medd illustration: Jack Hughes Until a decade ago, The Telegraph seemed happy to stand as the last corner of the Empire, a home for those who felt that this had been an altogether greener and more pleasant land in Edwardian times. Conservative with both a large and small ‘c’, it was, in the words of Max Hastings, its editor from 1986 to 1995, ‘in the business of reassurance, of providing confirmation each morning for our readers that their world is looking pretty safe and stable’. This, the conventional wisdom went, was a paper out of step with the rest of the country and doomed to fade away as its readership did. That, however, was then. Now, The Telegraph is perhaps the most forward-looking newspaper in the country.

Newspaper is no longer the word, for a start. Since 2006, it has been the Telegraph Media Group (TMG), a rebranding that made its intentions clear. With this virtual move came a very physical one. For over a century, from its 1855 foundation, the paper had resided in Fleet Street, and in 1987 joined the emigration of the industry to Canary Wharf, in London’s Docklands. In 2005, however, soon after it was taken over by David and Frederick Barclay, it announced a move back into the heart of London, to new premises on Buckingham Palace Road, Victoria. A building in Victoria Plaza, with 230,000 sq ft of office space recently vacated by a merchant bank, provided the space TMG required for its future plans. At the heart of that space, a new purpose-built newsroom was created that would embrace the enormous changes and challenges facing the industry.

For the first time, the entire editorial staff was housed on the same floor, creating a cooperative

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rather than competitive ethos between departments. They were arranged in a fan, or ‘spokes’, around what was named The Hub, a large round table in the middle of the room, used for conferences and meetings but also a ‘centre of gravity’, where key staff or working groups could gather. This innovative arrangement addressed the crucial issue facing not only The Telegraph but all newspapers: the integration of print and online content. Despite that fogeyish reputation, The Telegraph had been the first UK newspaper online, launching what was then called the Electronic Telegraph in 1994. As with all papers, however, the site had grown as a separate entity, managed by different staff and with different content, and this was a formula that no longer met the needs of readers.

The Telegraph had also been the first paper to produce a regular podcast, beginning in 2005, and had led the way in producing online video content, so the new offices included a TV and podcast studio and editing suite. As Edward Roussel, digital editor, explains, ‘An integrated

newsroom is about having your key editors responsible for their content, not only in the newspaper but also on the web and in digital format. Our legacy is as a 150-year-old newspaper but increasingly it’s about how to tell the story with video, and also user-generated content. It’s how you stitch those three things together that is the key.’

TMG has continued to innovate. In 2007, there was the addition to the website of My Telegraph, creating a platform for readers to save articles, blog and connect with other readers. There

is Telegraph TV, on-demand video content that ranges from the big political and economic headlines to sport, culture and ‘Weird Stories’. There is the use of the Digg widget that helps to direct traffic via social-media sites.

Despite this shift in emphasis, The Telegraph has continued to excel in its old job. Its columnists (and now bloggers) include some of the most respected names in journalism, from Peter Oborne on politics and Jeff Randall on finance to Jim White and Henry Winter on sport and Allison Pearson on life in general. If anything, it is on a high, having broken the 2009 story of MPs’ abuse of expenses, an oldfashioned investigative journalism and research piece that won it National Newspaper Of The Year 2010 at the British Press Awards and the admiration of even its closest competitors. And while the move towards a digital and online future might baffle some of the old guard among its readers, its circulation remains the highest of the broadsheets by some measure.

As those rivals are increasingly following its integrated process, TMG is still looking ahead, investing in digital research and the vexed question of finance.

The office design incorporates a 100ft video display projected onto the wall that features videocasts along with a ranking of the most-read website stories, but TMG made an early decision to move away from merely pursuing numbers in order to find more sustainable models of revenue. ‘Rather than focusing relentlessly on the aggregated numbers of unique users and page impressions,’ says Roussel, ‘we are now looking more at channels.’ For an industry at a crossroads, it’s the kind of thinking that is needed.

James Medd writes for The Times and The Observer

design & technology: Telegraph Media Group

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design & technology: google

With a full-size cinema, games room and coffee lab that serves 19 different blends, web giant Google has imported a distinctly Californian vibe into Buckingham Palace Road words: Tom Cheshire illustration: Jack Hughes One day a week, the 33,000-odd employees of Google don’t do their jobs. Instead, they can work on anything they like: to work on a new project, or fix something they think could improve. This ‘20 per cent time’ is not about goofing off, although you can do that if you want. The time off has led to many of the web giant’s most useful products, including Gmail, social network Orkut (extremely popular in Brazil), AdSense, Google News and Google Talk.

Twenty per cent time is one of Google’s many answers to a single tough question: how do you maintain the creativity of a Silicon Valley start-up when you are a sprawling multinational corporation? Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford University computer science students, turned their research project on web search into a company in 1998, with a simple mission statement: ‘Don’t be evil’.

In 2004, Google made its initial public offering on Nasdaq, with a market cap of over £14bn. In 2011, the company made a profit of around £7bn and its market capitalisation is just shy of around £128bn. Google is not just a search engine, it’s part of the Oxford English Dictionary. But search is just one Google product used by millions of people every day. There is also Google Maps and Streetview, Gmail, Google docs, Google Earth, Android phones (250 million sold last year), Google Chrome, the second most popular browser on

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the web, and Google+, its wouldbe rival to Facebook. With online video site YouTube, the Mountain View company is re-imagining cable TV in an unlimited bandwidth world. Google has gone from a single-product company to a multi-channel web power. With that has come brushes with regulatory authorities; in the US, Congress and the Department of Justice have raised antitrust questions; authorities in Germany have been incensed by what they call the illegal collection of users’ personal data. ‘Don’t be evil’ looks, to some, to be more optimistic than it is realistic.

But the company is only increasing its ambition. In May

this year, Nevada issued the first license for a self-driving car developed by Google (number plates feature the infinity symbol, which authorities thought apt for ‘the car of the future’); California is considering following suit. For the past two years, Google has been operating a fleet of at least eight autonomous vehicles that navigate and drive with no human input – by 2010, they had already covered 141,000 miles. Late last year, Google also showed off its Google Glasses – eyewear that overlays digital information, such as maps and email alerts, over the real world: real life Terminator vision. Co-founder Brin has been spotted wearing the glasses out and about in San Francisco.

The company’s secretive skunkworks, known as X Labs, is said to be working on an army of android robots to perform menial tasks and create a ‘space elevator’. A spokesman explains: ‘Google is collecting the world’s data, so now it could be collecting the solar system’s data.’

Key to these innovations is Google’s working culture. Twenty per cent time is just one of the perks offered to employees at its Mountain View headquarters, known as the Googleplex.

Employees get on-site healthcare and travel insurance, even for personal holidays. Free food is available 24/7 (famously, the first chef in the Google canteen used to cook for the Grateful Dead) and laundry is done for you. Herds of goats keep the grass trimmed outside (another 20 per cent time idea) and the company is currently constructing the largest corporate solar panel site in the world.

Google now has 70 offices around the world, in 40 countries.

Its European headquarters is in Dublin, for tax reasons, but its London headquarters in Victoria is the creative and strategic hub for the continent. And Google has imported a distinctly Californian vibe into Buckingham Palace Road.

The office has a full-size cinema, an indoor park featuring a rowing boat for one-on-one meetings, and a full-scale band rehearsal room, with guitars, drums and soundproofing. Part of the canteen has been set aside as a sushi bar, while a state-of-the-art coffee lab serves up 19 different blends. There is a games room complete with 60-inch Samsung TV and consoles, and a snooker table. Whiteboards hang throughout the complex, so that employees can jot something down whenever inspiration strikes.

‘The design was driven and project-managed by our London engineers. It is within informal environments that ideas come out.

A relaxed environment is important to us,’ says Nelson Mattos, vice president of engineering, EMEA region. It certainly provides plenty of scope for ‘20 per cent time’.

Tom Cheshire is associate editor of Wired magazine

design & technology: google

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design & technology: Bill & Melinda Gates

Staffing levels of the Gates Foundation’s London office may be small but the impact of its work is huge Words: Maria Yacoob Illustration: Jack Hughes A lot of big decisions are taken in Victoria, in buildings such as Scotland Yard, the Ministry of Justice and Westminster City Hall.

But inside one particular office here, employees grapple with the biggest questions of all. How can we eradicate malaria and polio?

What’s the best way to raise every person in the world out of poverty? How do we provide enough food for the planet’s evergrowing population?

These daunting responsibilities might overwhelm many mortals.

But for the 20 people on the payroll at Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s European HQ, attending to such issues is simply their everyday nine-to-five.

Of course, Bill Gates is not your average boss. As the cofounder and CEO of software giant Microsoft, he spearheaded the global revolution in personal computing, which made him incredibly wealthy. Gates topped the world’s rich list for 14 years.

Today, worth $61 billion, he sits at the number two spot.

But since amassing his fortune, Gates has devoted much of the last decade to giving it away. Eight years ago he and his wife Melinda decided to set up a foundation with an initial donation of $94 million. Today, with the combined donations of the Gates and Warren Buffet (number three on the global rich list), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s asset endowment is worth $36.3 billion. $25.36 billion of this has been pledged to charities and organisations across 100 countries, but all working in three main fields – global development, global health, and US education.

This means Gates is one of the world’s most generous philanthropists. But the influence

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of the Foundation goes further than just his chequebook. In a charity sector that seems to continually send out portents of doom, and a wider media that reports stories of inefficient and corrupted aid efforts, Gates pushes a message of optimism about what achievements have already been made, in terms of world development and world health, and what can be achieved in the future.

In the Foundation’s annual letter for 2012, Gates relays how new, disease-resistant seeds developed in the Sixties and Seventies lifted the proportion of world’s population classified as living in poverty from 40 per cent to 15 per cent, and why funding more research into agriculture will improve life further for the world’s subsistence farmers. He writes about how vaccines have eradicated smallpox, and look set to banish polio (India has just celebrated being ‘polio-free’ for over a year, and efforts are now concentrated on three remaining areas in Africa and Asia where the disease still exists). He explains how the GAVI Alliance (Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization – an organisation heavily supported by the Gates Foundation) is implementing two new vaccines. The first, against pneumococcus, is projected to

prevent almost half a million respiratory deaths by 2015. The second, rotavirus vaccine, will prevent nearly 200,000 deaths from diarrhoea. In total, GAVI’s work will save four million lives by 2015.

As befits a software genius, Gates’ focus is on how science and technology can find answers to the world’s problems. The Foundation gives huge sums of money to organisations developing vaccines. It also strongly backs organisations working on new, disease and weather-resistant strains of seeds for farmers.

Gates continually emphasises that ‘innovation is the key to improving the world’. An editorial in The Lancet spoke of how ‘The Foundation has challenged the world to think big and to be more ambitious about what can be done to save lives in low-income settings. The Foundation has added renewed dynamism, credibility and attractiveness to global health [as a cause].’

The Foundation’s work, which involves developing strategy, making grants, and measuring progress is carried out by 957 employees across offices in Seattle, Washington DC, London, New Delhi and Beijing.

The European office, run by Al Gore’s former press secretary Joe Cerrell, was set up at the beginning of 2010. It oversees the 534 grants to organisations in Europe, which total €3.9 billion.

But having an office in central London is also strategically crucial for the Foundation. Europe is a hub for major international development organisations. The continent provides over 60 per cent of the world’s official development assistance. European governments help shape the international development agenda.

London is arguably the most important city in Europe. And Victoria, with parliament and government offices right on its doorstep, is the ideal location in the capital, not to mention the fact that Microsoft itself has its London base just around the corner, in Cardinal Place.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has quickly become a very important player in global development and health issues. It is the largest transparently operated private foundation in the world. And because it is unencumbered by bureaucracy, unlike huge organisations such as the UN, it can act fast as well as big. It looks like Bill Gates is once again at the forefront of a global phenomenon. Only this time the profit is measured not in dollars, but in lives.

Maria Yacoob is a freelance journalist who writes for Esquire, GQ, Blueprint and the Independent on Sunday

design & technology: Bill & Melinda Gates

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design & technology: channel 4

From Brookside to Made in Chelsea, Channel 4 – headquartered on Victoria’s Horseferry Road – has been defining and redefining itself for 30 years words: Josh Sims illustration: Jack Hughes For anyone who has grown up in the internet or digital TV age, it might be hard to believe that the launch of a new TV channel could have such deep impact – indeed, any real impact at all. Today there are specialist channels for every interest and demographic. Back at the cusp of the Eighties, there were just three TV channels, two state run and one commercial channel, its advertising revenue making it a somewhat secondclass operation in the eyes of the arty elite. But then, 30 years ago this year, came Channel 4 – not the most original name, perhaps, but driven by original content.

If the BBC was constrained by institutionalised and conservative values, and the need to protect the licence fee, while ITV was beholden to the idea that massmarket programming (and hence high-viewing figures) was essential to bringing in advertising, Channel 4 rebutted both these philosophies.

It had, as writer Maggie Brown says in the title of her book on the history of the channel, ‘a licence to be different’. That, of course, appealed to upmarket, youthful, progressive audiences, which in turn appealed to advertisers and allowed creative risks to be taken.

Indeed, Channel 4’s content may – like the idea of just three channels – seem quaint now, but before the multi-channel world and market forces dampened its thunder, that content inevitably defined or redefined a genre. The Tube reinvented popular music on TV, while The Big Breakfast did the same for the early morning

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schedule; The Word effectively invented TV for youth in the UK, while Brookside re-imagined the soap as a provocative vehicle by which to address the more challenging issues of the day, famously showing the first lesbian kiss on primetime British television.

Channel 4 also became an important player in the British film industry through its Film Four spinoff, and the channel won awards for its documentaries, which were incisive, smart and unapologetically programmes of social purpose – providing ‘moments of quiet seriousness,’ as its pioneer Jeremy Isaacs put it – while others were sometimes just silly. Channel 4 is

stick two fingers up at the bores.’

That has meant that, through the years, Channel 4 has inevitably courted controversy and made mistakes – a product, perhaps, media commentator Maggie Brown has argued, of the channel’s internal contradictions, being a public institution yet kickstarting a new generation of independent producers; kicking against tradition and yet being a powerful brand. It was, for example, slow to deal with the fall-out from programmes such as Big Brother.

According to Tim Gardam, the channel’s director of programmes during the beginning of the last decade, when it faced huge market changes, the channel did not meet head-on the challenge of breaking out of ‘the cast of mind that opposes the older and serious versus the younger and tabloid’, and so it became increasingly populist in its programming, not letting go of jaded series fast enough.

There were even, for a while, the channel that brought us Faking It and, more recently, plans in place for Channel 4 to be Make Bradford British, but also granted a portion of the licence Wife Swap and Made in Chelsea. fee, in order to see it through Then there was the channel’s tricky times. Such are the trials of role as an importer of American, being both business and cultural era-defining shows, the likes of touch point perhaps.

Its recent billboard campaign Friends, Sex and the City and Hill Street Blues. It was a blow to for the latest series of My Big Fat British-made culture perhaps, but Gypsy Wedding, which boldly it also encouraged a tired industry claimed to be ‘Bigger, Fatter, perhaps inevitably to raise its game – as well as, Gypsier’, cleverly, allowing Channel 4 to displayed Channel 4’s readiness subsidise its home-grown fare. to speak out, speak the public Along the way, from its headquarters mind or, depending on your on Horseferry Road in Victoria, as standpoint, speak offensively in if by way of compensation, the firing line again. At the same Channel 4 also managed to make time, Channel 4 was shooting a documentary the careers of some of Britain’s groundbreaking most culturally important figures, that would crash a Boeing 727 presenters, creatives and passenger jet in the Mexican executives: from Issacs – the man desert as part of a scientific who made it all happen, fed up experiment exploring just what with the BBC/ITV hegemony – to goes on during such a terrible Michael Grade, Phil Redmond event. The last organisation to and Jools Holland, to Liz Forgan, attempt such a thing was NASA, Chris Evans and Andrea Wonfor. and that was three decades ago.

As the art critic Waldemar In a multi-channel world, it seems Januszczak once said of Wonfor, it’s more about picking your in a way that could have been programme than the channel. speaking for the channel at large: Josh Sims writes for the Financial ‘She believes television should Times and The Independent

design & technology: channel 4

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NICOLA PETERS

street style

Occupation ENGAGEMENT MARKETING MANAGER. Photo taken on DEAN RYLE STREET

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Fashion designers, stylists, auction house cataloguers, TV executives… Victoria is a hub of creative talent, with style to match. We hit the streets to scout the area’s best dressed locals photography Phill Taylor

LUIS SILVESTRE Occupation VISUAL MERCHANDISER. Photo taken on DEAN RYLE STREET

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KELLY PANAYI Occupation CATALOGUER. Photo taken on EMERY HILL STREET

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LEWIS SMITH Occupation CREATIVE MEDIA PRODUCTION CO-ORDINATOR. Photo taken in ST JOHN’S GARDENS

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CHARLOTTE LEWIS Occupation STYLIST. Photo taken on GREENCOAT ROW

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SHARON PATTER Occupation TV EXECUTIVE. Photo taken on THIRLEBY ROAD

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David Nicholls Occupation Design Editor. Photo taken at cardinal place

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GWEN COATMEUR Occupation WOMEN’S WEAR SHOE DESIGNER. Photo taken in SMITH SQUARE

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DANIELA AGNELLI Occupation FASHION DIRECTOR. Photo taken on AMBROSDEN AVENUE

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EKATERINA BELONOGOVA Occupation ACCESSORIES DESIGNER. Photo taken in ST JOHN’S GARDENS

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To find out more about the new Victoria please contact Kaela Fenn-Smith telephone: 020 7024 3790 email: kaela.fenn-smith@landsecurities.com Adrian Crooks telephone: 020 7024 3855 email: adrian.crooks@landsecurities.com

editor: Sarah Deeks senior art director: Ciara Walshe art editor: Jon Morgan chief copy editor: Chris Madigan picture editor: Juliette Hedoin copy editors: Cate Langmuir, Tanya Jackson creative director: Ian Pendleton editorial director: Joanne Glasbey managing director: Peter Howarth

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