 So thank you everyone for joining us tonight. It's my pleasure to introduce our speaker all the way from London, Tamir Hassan. Tamir is deputy chair, lead director for the London Office of Donald Ansel Associates, which is one of the older and more established architectural conservation practices in the United Kingdom with offices positioned throughout the UK. And it's over 100 employees strong. Donald Ansel Associates is not just a thriving architectural conservation practice, but also one that recently nurtured one of our very own Roger Williams graduates, Elisa Ross, who sadly passed away nearly a year ago, but whose memory is one of the reasons we're gathered here tonight for Tamir's talk. Tamir is a graduate of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and the University of Oxford. And as a conservation architect, she's been involved with the restoration of England's most iconic buildings, such as Christopher Wren's Greenwich Hospital, perhaps better known as the old Royal Naval Colleges at Greenwich, and Pugin's Palace of Westminster, also known as the Houses of Parliament, among others. Tamir has worked in Pakistan, Egypt, and England, and has become especially interested in the regeneration of historic fabric. She strongly believes that old buildings should continue to be used and experienced by current and future generations. And her talk today is a case study of one such project in London. So with that, please welcome Tamir Hassan. I'd like to, before I begin my talk, just mention Elisa, who was a graduate of Roger William and who passed away last year after having worked with us for five years, almost. She came as an architect and rose to the position of an associate. She was an exceptionally bright and able person, and we sorely miss her. And we are hoping to set up a scholarship with Roger Williams for travel to England for students of the preservation or architecture at this university. Donald and associate, to those of you who do not know, is an old established firm. It was set up in 1958 by Sir Donald Insel. And we, as architects and town planners, with a particular interest in conservation, we are an employee-owned trust with just over 120 members. We have branches throughout England. And as you can see from this picture, we have a large number of female. In fact, we are over 50% women. So we are a special firm in that respect. Our work is largely, we work largely on palaces, country houses. We've worked on Windsor Castle after the fire. We work at the House of Parliament. We have worked at the Tower of London. This is the House of Parliament. We do work at Buckingham Palace. And our portfolio also includes a large number of the greatest states who are major developers in the city of London. And that is what I will be talking about in more details. But Hassan and Nate insisted that I should put some of our projects in. So I'm just going to rush through some that I have put up on the screen. This is the King's Observatory. This is King George III's Observatory at Kew. It was built in 1768 for the transit of Venus. It was a little folly for King George, built by his mother next to her palace. And it is being converted to a private residence. This is a house, a grade one listed building in central London to which we have added an extension. We've done our share of museums. And this is a little museum in Parkingwell. It is a Jacobian building. And this is an office development in central London again. It is an Edwardian building. It was a hospital which was extended and has now become part of a large office building. These are baths in bath. This is the cross baths, which is regenerated as an active bath. And this is a house in the north which was a ruin and has been regenerated as a residence. This is, again, a country house, and which these are all listed. In other words, they are on the preservation list. And it was extended with a swimming pool and additional accommodation. These are the walls of Chester. They are Roman walls which were completed in the 12th century. And we have regenerated them as an active tourist wall with the local community. So they have little moments of interest and you can walk around them. We do our share of monuments throughout London. So we have the Queen Mother. We have the Battle of Britain, which was added to an event of the London Tube, which you see above, and the Battle of Britain below. We have recently put up Nelson Mandela on in Westminster's Parliament Square. We also do new buildings. And this is Stephen Hawkins building in Cambridge. And these are more details of the same. This is a more recent project. It is the copper bins, which is a new structure which was developed as a museum for the copper mining in Wales. But the main thrust of my talk is on Regent Street, which is a street which you may or may not know. It is one of the major shopping streets. It is one of the earliest designed boulevards, as it were, inverted commas in central London. It is an early 19th century building and it sort of stretches across. So I will be talking about this street. This is Piccadilly Circus in case, just to give you a position. And I'll be talking about this building. So this street which sort of stretches across and then that little building, which is the one that I'll be discussing in some more detail. So Regent Street is a street that stretches from this area, which is Regent's Park and it grows across and ends up here. It was a street that was designed to link this park with the Palace of George IV, which was Carlton House Palace, which sat here. And it's a palace that George had inhabited for 36 years and then he had demolished as he moved into Buckingham Palace. Buckingham Palace is, can you see it, it's sort of around here. So Regent Street, as I was saying, is owned by the Crown Estate. London, as you can see from this map, is divided between the Great Estates. The Great Estates were given to these people initially by Henry VIII when he dissolved the monasteries and he gave parcels of land to his friends and family. And at that time they were just parcels of land, which were grazing lands and they were gradually developed largely in the 18th century into urban accommodation. And the way the system worked is that an area was laid out around a square with houses and the estate would then give away those houses to individual developers for a very nominal sum. The developer would put the building up to an overall design given to them by the estate. He would sell it and make profit and the estate would then agree a lease with the end holder. And after 100 years the property would come back to the estate and they would lease it again. And so the Crown Estate, as you can see, owns a piece of land which is Regent's Park and it owns a parcel of land around here, which is where Carlton House was. And they wanted to put up a street which would connect the two so that it would develop this area which was rather poor and it would extend the regeneration of this land which belonged to the Portland estate and it had already been regenerated. And this is Regent's Park and this is what the Portland estate had developed. So they came up with a scheme to design a street, a shopping street which would bring them some money but would also connect Regent's Park to the Palace of George IV. And they chose for that purpose, so this is again the same map and you can see the Regent Street which they had developed had to circumvent all of these other properties. So it had to swirl, it no longer was a straight street, it was a street that did sort of curves and circumvented around various property it. It missed Oxford Circus, Oxford Street wasn't such a great street, it swerved around the property of Lord Langham because he wouldn't sell his estate, it curved around and formed a quadrant because these people wouldn't sell theirs and so the street kind of stretched. It took a course according to the property, according to where they could put their layout. And the job, the architect who got the job was John Nash. And this was odd because Nash had in 1798 married a young lady called Mary Ann and Mary Ann was the mistress of George IV, as you can see from the picture above and she came with a retinue of children whom it is assumed, who were never paid for by John Nash. So it is assumed that George IV and John Nash had a kind of an arrangement. But be that as it may, Regent Street was laid out and very successfully so. It was basically a design, he gave a design concept, so he laid out the facade, this is what they would look like and individual architects would design the buildings which shops at the bottom and accommodation at the top of the street also included churches, it included theaters and concert halls, et cetera. So successful was Regent Street that by the end of the 19th century, those buildings had been extended upwards and sideways and every which way they could because it was very, very popular. So much so that in the, it was the end of the 19th century when the quadrant which is that little corner came for development, the local authority had to consider very carefully who to give this job of designing too, the design guidelines too. And they chose an old architect called Norman Shaw. Norman Shaw designed a building, but he also designed and, but by that time the developer, the local shopkeepers were so powerful that they objected. And one of the things they objected to was the colonnade that was initially sort of designed to go around it. They said that the colonnade was obscured, they had their shoppers, they couldn't see the wares, that there was loitering going on in the street. And so the crown estate being a very clever developer, they said, right, okay, well, we'll get rid of this arcade. And the point that I'm making is that Regent Street when it was redeveloped in the early 20th century, which is the first time the leases fell in, really took the form it did because the shopkeepers and the users of the street wanted it to look like that. And so it had, it was designed as a tall street with a particular stone finish and it do the design largely of Reginald Bronfield and you see one of his, but it is more or less a kind of homogenous. It has a design guide and everybody does their own thing, but basically the street looks homogenous. Side streets similarly. When the crown estates leases fell again at the beginning of the 21st century, they couldn't do what the crown had done previously because by the time they got the buildings, they were listed. That means they couldn't really change them. So they called upon us, Donald and Sue associate, to help them as the conservation we designed, a conservation plan, which basically looked at each building and it said, you've got to keep this, but you can get rid of this because this is peculiar and special. This is not that special. There's so many more of these. And so a kind of on a building by building basis, we gave them a guideline of what they could pull down, what they could keep, how much they had to change. And now Regent Street has developed into a really successful and active shopping street. It has the apple shop. It has some sort of high end retailers. It has some really swishy residential on the side streets where expensive people buy expensive houses and so on and so forth. But the building that along the, one of the buildings that was causing a lot of problems in terms of its position is this block, which is known as the region, was known as the Regent Palace Hotel. And it lay at the end of the quadrant. It wasn't a listed building. It was in the middle of a tight corner. It was an island site. It, this whole area had fallen into sort of ruin and it needed regeneration. And the crown appointed an architect who said, well, the only way you can do this building is to demolish it and build a new structure. And the moment they said that the local immunity societies and the local residents were up in arms and the building was put on the preservation register, i.e. it was listed. And therefore they could do nothing but to look to us to help them out. And we worked with Jeremy Dixon who was the architect to come up with a plan. The Regent Palace Hotel was built in 1910. It was built by JJ Lyons who were restaurateurs and they provided us restaurants and in the food industry to all classes of people. So the very rich and the very poor. So they knew where the market was. And the Regent Palace Hotel was designed not for the upper echelon. It was required for the second tier of travelers. And it was assisted to their Strand Palace Hotel which was for the higher end travelers. And London had a lot of travelers. There were a lot of trains. There were a lot of people moving about. There were boats. They were traveling and it was needed. And so this hotel was developed in a Bozar stride. It was sort of very, all the mod cons it had. And for its facade it used a new technology which is the glazed ceramic and terracotta. The building had a wonderful, glamorous lobby but it was basically glamour on a budget because it had a thousand rooms but they used shared a bathroom. It didn't have en suite. And it had a winter garden with a dome designed by the Brahms Grove Guilds. It had very high quality material but only for the public areas. By the time the building was being looked at in the 20th century, so around 2004, 2005, the whole building had come to a rather sad stale. This is what the dome looked like. This is what the dome should have looked like. It had been divided up. And basically you could buy rooms by the hour at the Regent Palace Hotel. And one of the more important aspect of the architecture of the Regent Palace Hotel were rooms that were put, it's dining rooms which had been designed in 1930s by an architect called Oliver Barnard. And you see these rooms. When the hotel was opened they were described and praised by the architectural industry as naughty but not vulgar. So they were really quite wonderful buildings. They used new materials. They used different types of timber. They used fermica. It was the first building that was lined in fermica. They used the new type of lighting. They used cold cathode and incandescent lighting. They used really fancy plaster work. Oliver Barnard had been to America. He had worked on ships. He was a state-set designer. And in this building he really displayed his skill to the utmost. The Regent Palace Hotel, as I said, had by the end of the 20th century, beginning of the 20th, my end of the 20th century, 2004, 2005, fallen into complete disrepair. You can see the ceramic tiles had been beginning to fall off. The streets were congested. The building was covered with neon lights. It was not in a very good state. And here it is again. It was all boarded up and blocked. The windows were falling to pieces. It was a difficult building to regenerate because it had very low ceiling heights. Whoops. It had very low ceiling heights. And the problem had been, the reason why the first architect had said that they would demolish it is because it was impossible to put services. It was impossible to reuse it. And so then we looked at the building quite carefully and we analyzed and we discovered that actually the importance of the building was its facade, but it was basically its urban views and its 1930s room. So a scheme was developed where you kept the corners, which were your urban sort of points, and you kept your 1930s rooms. You moved the one room which was on the ground floor to the basement to accompany the other rooms which were already in the basement, forming sort of a group of 1930s interiors and clearing up the ground floor for development. And here you have a section showing you the building with an atrium in the middle and all the rooms which were to be conserved in the basement. The ground floor itself was then developed and broken up into little sections. So this corner which was retained was turned into small offices and it could do small offices with a low ceiling height. That corner which again had low ceiling height was converted into a residential unit. The rest became retail and connected to the street and you had large scale offices. The building also had a large, what we call loading bay, but I will come to that later on. And the rest of it were just offices with a atrium in the middle, as I had described earlier. Work began on the site on, consent was given to the building in 2008 to go ahead, which is exactly when the Lehman brother fell. And so it was developed at the height of the recession. And work began by, oops, as you can see the building, the center core of the building was taken down. The rooms were dismantled and moved out of sight. Those that were to remain were preserved and protected. And the building started to be developed. When you put a building like this together, which has a combination of a preserved bit and a new bit, one of the issues is always the junctions, the joints. The people who, Dixon Jones, who were designing the new building, used the same fire, so the same ceramic maker as the one who was going to repair ours in the core shores of Darwin. They're one of the few firms that still produce glazed ceramic clients using the old technique. So you get this uneven glazing. But the tolerance levels are very different. The glazed ceramic, which were used, sorry, which were used by Dixon Jones, were manufactured in England, shipped to Brussels to be put on panels, then sent to Switzerland, who were then put onto their system, and then brought back to England and assembled. The tolerance levels of the original ceramic, the old ceramic is about two to three inches. The tolerance level of the Swiss-made ceramic was five millimeters. And these are the sort of differences that you get the building that is old sitting on old footing moves differently, the building that is on new footing meets differently. And so junctions became a real concern of ours and we have to detail that quite carefully. The ceramics themselves had, which is the glazed finance had it said deteriorated because they were also reinforced with iron, which was obviously rusting and blowing. And so these are the new ceramics which are manufactured. Finance was developed by the same people who made sinks. So basically all the ceramics are like sort of big sinks and they are filled with a light concrete and then they are put up to form the details. And here it is going up onto the facade. So they're slightly self, they can be sat on top or they can take the weight, but they still have to be attached to the building. The network on the roof along with the finance, as you can see, was the other external fabric that was conserved. And you can see the corner cartooshes which are lion cartooshes in memory of J.P. Lyons were clad in lead, they're made out of timber. And they were clad in lead and these were very carefully dismantled, measured, a cast made of them in place, we lost them and dropped them. And then they were recast with new lead and here they are all sort of sitting in a row. All the timber was preserved. You can see the old timber rows which are put in underneath. So we used all the original timber, as much of it as we can replacing only that which is necessary. And here they are being sort of put back onto the roof, new lead roofs. And here is the building with its corners preserved on the main block replaced. The Regent Palace Hotel is a Briam excellent building or lead gold star. It has a power, a fuel cell and it provides energy to the buildings around it. It also has, as I said, a loading bay which connects to the other building so that you park your car here. There's a, you park your vehicle which is offloading into this building and through a tunnel you can service all the other which meant that a lot of the pedestrian, a lot of the road traffic on narrow streets could be removed because these two buildings are now connected through a tunnel and this could be pedestrianized. This is part of the public realm which was developed as the building. The streets were therefore now after the conservation of the main block are much more appealing. You have a wholesale retailer and the building now connects unlike the Regent Palace Hotel which had no presence on the street. The new building was regenerated with much more active street frost activities. And here it is again with the combination of the old and new. The fiances were cleaned and repaired and the new building inserted in the core of it and more views of the same. The offices were regenerated as high-end offices and Al Gore was one of the first to rent an office there because of the green credential of the building. So the development comprised 180,000 square feet of grade A offices, 16,000 square feet of small office suites, nine residential apartments, 58,000 square feet of retail and 44,000 square feet of public enabling 12,000 square feet of off street service yard which is a service yard that I talked about. So by keeping the old fabric what we had done is provided the crown estate with a building which would, you know just as successful as a new block would have been but evidently more attractive. And these are the old dining halls which were also part of our conservation scheme and these are the set. They were divided into two units, one set which had three rooms, the shake up, the smoking bar and the Atlantic which I will return to and the room that was brought down from the ground floor which is the Titanic bar. When Oliver Barnard had put the rooms together which this is the Titanic, he had actually placed them on top of the existing Edwardian interior so fortunately for us we could dismantle them because he had just simply, they were like a sort of a kit of parts and he had just clamped them onto the Edwardian interiors and they could then be disassembled and taken away and restored and put back which is exactly what we did to them. They were very lush interiors but when we received them they looked like this and we had to do careful paint analysis, we had to do research on the wood. This is rosewood and it's got brass details, it's got brass cornices. It has corrugated glass panels which are lit at the back. It had embossed aluminum veneers on top of bird's eye maple. It was quite a spectacular interior and when we dismantled the building we discovered that the reason why it had fallen apart is that it had basic floors. So the embossed aluminum veneers on top of the bird's eye were actually just pasted onto plaster and of course that just fell apart and we took it to the room apart and we made some changes. So the columns were taken away and this is basically just telling us the engineer how big a column they could make. We had to insulate them far, insulate the columns and make them comply with modern standards of regulations and then they were reassembled. The panels, the wall panels, we did not put plaster back on them. We changed the details to plywood and applied the veneer on top and the profiles of the ceilings were taken in great detail because the ceiling had asbestos, we couldn't use it and we were talking earlier this process of the scale of the operation, the restoration of the building alone was 20 million pounds. So when you are working on a scale like this, you can't use artisans, you have to use tradesmen who have that kind of insurance so they are big tradesmen and they don't do conservation. So part of what we did was to train their people how to do this and this happens every so often when we restored Windsor Castle 20 years ago. There was a whole bunch of people that got trained and apprentices and they were the apprentices that we used when we did Regent Palace Hotel 20 years later and they trained a whole bunch of other apprentices with us and this is basically how the system works. So projects of this scale are important and this is them putting back the Titanic with its ceilings. Of course on top of that, you can see that all the services are in place and the rooms are just basically interiors which are clipped on. And here it is, all the details of this glass which was specially cast, all the lights which were specially made, the chrome finished finials and details where they were lost, they were recreated, this crinolation. So there was a lot of new stuff and new training and wonderful material. And paint analysis had told us the color of the Titanic and despite everybody objecting to these green colors, we did put them on and when we lit it the way Oliver Barnard had expected it to be lit with two different types, two different sources of light and incandescent and a cold cathode, it really lit up very, very differently and it all made sense. And you can see how the domes were different and the edges were different and you understand how lighting is an essential part of the whole interiors and colors have to be looked at in that sense and the bird's eye maple made sense and it all sort of came together. But the Titanic was led to a restaurateur that sells steaks and they couldn't cope with the green color because the customers didn't want green colored meat. So they repainted the ceilings and as you can see, it just lost it. And these are the new ceilings painted in a kind of an off-white. The room that we looked at is called the Atlantic Bar which I have pointed out to you. This is, it was an Edwardian interior. It had a link ruster which is that heavily mottled wallpaper around it, both on the ceilings and the walls. When Oliver Barnard did it up, he didn't really change much of it. It had breccia which is like a pink marble on the columns, gilded plaster cobbles, quite elaborate cornices. He simply removed the link ruster wallpaper and he painted the walls as we discovered through paint analysis, they were marble grained and he changed the lights. Again, this room by 2004 had changed completely. It looked like that. Lights were made out of some plastic material. The walls were very heavily painted. And again, this is what the room looked like. It was nothing like what our analysis of the material and our paint analysis was telling us and our study of photographs was telling us. So the room was reassembled very carefully and this is just a drawing showing how carefully you have to work out ceilings and you have to discuss with the engineer where they can, how deep their beams can be. This building was taking all the offices above it, had not enough columns, so they were huge transfer beams. So all this is quite carefully orchestrated. And the elements of the room were dismantled and they were sent to a workshop. It all has to be kept at temperature and humidity controlled, both the trucks that took the timber away and the workshop where it was being maintained. And sort of very heavy restoration. We also convinced our client to use 24 karat gold to gild their ceilings, which they did, as you can see. And what they did is they bought more gold than they needed and at the end of the job they could sell the stuff they did in time. They made a little bit of a profit on it. And this is the room when it was reinstated. And it is now one of the most successful restaurants on Brass Rees in London. It serves a thousand people a day. And it's one of Jeremy King's who's the restaurant's most successful Brass Rees. And this is what it looks like. The third room which I'd like to look at today is the Shake Up Bar, which is one of the first Famaika-lined interiors in London. And the Shake Up Bar, as you can see here, had completely disintegrated. In fact, it was nothing. There was no Famaika left. And the question was why did the Famaika disintegrate? And of course, because the Famaika built or made in the 1930s was very brittle. So it cracks and it falls apart and it chips. And it's quite difficult unless you take the whole thing apart. It's quite difficult to replace it. So we had to come up with a technique where we could get back the Famaika, but design it in a manner that the room could be dismantled and reassembled in case you needed to replace it. So it was, and we had to also recreate it because we had photographs, but when we had the room, but we didn't know what the building looked like. Unfortunately, Mr. Barnard's drawings survive at the RIBA. So we looked at them very carefully and here's the interiors of the Shake Up as designed by Oliver Barnard. And we followed this very closely to recreate the building at the room and including these windows, which were the sort of colored glass window. And to get, we did a lot of traveling for this building. This glass comes from France. So it comes from Sengoba. So we went there and we looked at all the colored glass and we matched the ones we wanted. The marble comes from Italy. So that was, we went to Italy to source the marble that they needed. And the wood, a lot of the wood that we used in this restoration was no longer available because it was not source. So we had to use matching material and in the Atlantic we had to use eucalyptus instead of Asian sapon wood. But it's all part of the sort of the journey. Coming back to Shake Up. So these are the columns in manufacture and they were assembled off-site and then they were brought back and put into their context. They are made in strips. So you can see they're made in little pieces which sort of clip on to one after the other and they're tied by a metal brace, which you can just about see here. The floor as well was made off-site and reassembled. It is a sort of a mosaic. We had to analyze each and every piece of timber because it has three different types of timber. And we had to source that so that we could get the color we wanted. These are the windows that were assembled to Oliver Barnard's design. This light was also made to his design but it had to be, obviously, it had to be fit for purpose so it has a rather complicated pulley system to bring it down and take it up. And we had to redesign the lights. We need to get the cold cathode just the right color and this is the copper clock which was again to Oliver Barnard's detail. And here is the room. Today it is a very successful jazz nightclub. It also has ballesque music and it really is a really popular place. The last room in the set of interiors is the smoking room which, as you can see, was made of two-toned birchwood and by the time we were looking at the building, none of that striation was visible. The room looked very bland and so the columns were taken off to the workshop and we discovered that because he had cut the veneer in a particular chavron style, you could actually do two different tones of polish on it and it wouldn't run into each other. So that's, you know, you sort of begin to learn the techniques because you wanted a darker and a lighter. So this was all stained in a pale polish and then the odd one was slightly darkened and to our amazement it worked. And oops, sorry. And here is the room before it was given away. It had new lights, it had these windows are original, the grills are original, but the columns have been reinstated and this is the room now a very successful and popular American bar where you have cocktails again run by Jeremy King. And all in all what the Crown Estate got was exactly the sort of building that they had wanted from the beginning, a very active facade which is over here and you can see and over here a new insert, an old conserved building which from as far as the street views were concerned maintained its integrity and the continuity with its surrounding and yet it provided all the facilities that the Crown Estate ever wanted and even though it was rent leapt out at the height or the deepest trough of the recession, economic recession written, it was 75% rented out before it was completed. And I think the secret of that is this combination of the old and the new and I think the combination of the two is a win-win and Regent Street is a perfect example of a street like that which had always been dictated by the market. All its development phases were designed to suit the market. It's a commercial street, but it also shows how you can change the face of a city. When Nash had built the street, it was shops with residential on the top. When it came back for renovation or release in the early 20th century, it was shops and offices and by the end of the 20th century it needed to go back to residential. So it again became a combination of shops, residential and retail and done differently and lit differently and today it is again one of the most desirable streets in London and perhaps the historic fabric of a city doesn't all have to be treated like a museum piece. It is about keeping our cities going. It is about not preventing economic change and social change and commercial needs, but it's about being clever with how you live in heritage. And one of the models of Donald Inso associates is living buildings. We believe in living buildings. And I think Regent Street is a good example of a living street for you all to come and have a look at. Thank you. I guess keeping the exterior side and also what I mentioned to you was like there are not any systems up in the door. Did you try to do your best to connect with the old facade? Where the facade was retained, where the blocks were retained, they were complete blocks that stood on their own. There's one stretch which is a retained facade and it's quite clever. You have to just make the movement joints sort of function, but of course the interior has to be designed so that it lines up with the windows and you don't have sort of ceiling heights visible in the middle of the window. It's a technical question. It's about movement joints. So you build your interiors with the slabs that you want to and you clip your facade onto it, but you allow the two to move differently because your new foundations will shift at a different level to your old foundation. And then the ceiling heights for the day back same as the original, they said the original slabs, they were plowed, so did you extend the space or did you try to make it what it was before? Well, the reason why a lot of people were shying away from regenerating is because they couldn't put their ducts through the ceilings. And by building the interior separately, you could find a route for the duct which was not necessarily along the ceilings. So we found alternative ways. We had a slightly deeper floor where all the wires, the cables could be run, but we had ducts which were run in cores so they didn't need to run along the ceiling. So you find an alternative way of servicing your space which does not necessarily compromise the sections which do still continue to line up with your windows. Does that answer your question? Yeah. Regarding Nash's vision for the street, how much of that would you say is still intact in the absence of one? There's nothing left of Nash's. There are a few vaults and little bits here and there, but really it's all gone. This was the difference between it coming up in the early 20th century when it was just all taken apart, new put in. And this is mostly the work of Shaw. All of Shaw is gone. So this is all largely tanner, Bloomfield, wire, normally Shaw, Smirk, they're different architects. But the vision, it sort of generated out of Bloomfield's vision of what height it should be and that was governed by how high the shopkeepers had put their building up. So they thought, okay, this is the optimum height that is commercially successful, so we will go with this. And so it was really quite, it was a commercial decision, but it was a design code that has given it that homogeneity. And that's how a lot of London is developed. So if you look at the Georgian squares, they have an idea of the whole, but behind each wall, there's a completely different interiors. So when Covent Garden was developed by the Duke of Bedford, Inigo Jones laid out the square and he laid out the church. A lot of it is now lost, but he laid out an arcade. He knew what the building should look like. And then you had individual developers who built behind and they stuck to the vision, but they all did their own thing. And that's really been the way the London urban fabric has rigid, has been laid out. A lot of the urban fabric has been laid out. You have the sense of that the street itself, the path of the street is still natural, right? Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. No, no, that's true. That's true. Which is really unique in the history. Yes. It's still there. And it's a perfect example of the whole thing of property rights. Unlike France, they couldn't just go through a boulevard. It was not possible. So they had to do the curves and the swerves and the... And the interesting thing is that the whole business of connecting Regent's Park to Colton House, Regent Street was completed in 1827. And on 1827, Joseph decided he didn't really, he couldn't be bothered to live in Colton House. It never fitted him. He kept making it more and more his, but that wasn't quite suited. He went to three or four architects and then he had to help with it. He moved on to Buckingham Palace and pulled the building down. So it was demolished in 1827. That stands for today. There is the Athenaeum Club and then there's the Institute of Directors and then there's Colton House Terrace, which is the one that overlooks the mall. That's where it is. And there's Waterloo Place. And it's quite a grand sort of arrival. But it's interesting because it empties, just has a view on to Green Park. Yeah. Yeah, there would have been a block at the end of it, which was the, which was George the Fourth. George the Fourth was a great collector of art and Colton House was too small for him. And it wasn't ostentatious enough. So he moved into Buckingham Palace. Thank you. I was wondering in the process that this project went through in order to agree to the project by presentation of that. What was the public response? I know there was a particular response that went to the building preserved to some degree. Were they satisfied with the outcome at the end? How did that go? So these, the reason Paul Sotel went through a huge process of consultation. It is based on, it was based on a very detailed historic building assessment report. So we went through all the history of the building through every element of it. We wrote a sort of a justification of what we wanted to do because a justification is weighing benefit against harm. So you say, this is the benefit we're giving you and in lieu of this benefit that we're giving you, you should allow us to take this bit away. And that's basically the process, the judgment process. But in, and therefore in England, we have several bodies. We have a historic English heritage, which sort of looks over everybody onto the consultation. We have the local planning authorities, which have a conservation officer who also has a view. We also have local immunity societies, in this case, the 20th Century Society and the Victorian Century, Victorian Society. Victorian who also look after the Edwardian buildings and the 20th Century Society who looked over the 20th Century Society. So then you have the local residents who were really emotionally very attached to the building and they really didn't want anything changed and they weren't really convinced. And then you have the crowded state who really wanted to make money basically, that's the bottom line. And so it went through a whole. We had, even during the construction period, we had weekly, we had a slot for everybody to come and talk to and the contractor would speak to them, we brought schools in, we marched children through our buildings, we have a time capsule put together by the school which is buried in the building. We had everybody, you know, it was just, you know, it was sort of a weekly event of taking people along, showing them what we were doing. It's a very tight site because, and so getting to it was very difficult. Building it is very difficult. You can't bring huge lorries and trucks in. It was noisy, so the neighbors complained. So there was a whole team that just looked after, you know, answering everybody's questions and sort of making sure that there was no noise between nine o'clock in the morning and 12 o'clock in the afternoon and so on and so forth. Because it was a Brayham Edsland, we had to measure every piece of waste that went out. We had to see how many trucks came in, how much fuel they used. It was a kind of, it was a big event. The building was quite an expensive building. It's over 700 million pounds. It has a fuel cell, the first of its type. It, as I said, because they had this vision of being able to open up the area, it was quite a game changer for the whole area. We then went on to do the building opposite, which is the Cafe Royal, which we worked with David Chipperfield on. So we got quite good at this by the end of the game. You mentioned at one point, when you wanted to take the building back, people got enlisted. Yes. Because isn't that the process usually takes? Yes, it was one of the few buildings that was spot listed. So it wasn't originally on the listed building register. But when the general public saw the extent of demolition, when the design went to the local authority for planning consent, there was an uproar and the 20th Century Society and English Heritage came along and they said, what, okay, now you can't do anything to it, it's listed. So it was one of these few buildings that really went through the listing process quite quickly. Rightly so. But then we could also work with them and say, look, you either have a building that nobody uses and it continues to fall apart, or you make a compromise and you allow us to take some and give, you know, it's basically a matter of give and take. And so now they're all very proud of it. And which is quite nice. And we came out of it with a lot of new tradesmen and quite a lovely building in the end. A very successful one. It's so fascinating when you are taking on a role of training, perhaps both to normally have that expertise and I wondered if you could just talk a little bit about how your office handles both cultivating that expertise in your office and then maybe even counter situations in which a process or a way of manufacturing something has been sort of lost. Well, a lot of the techniques that are used are often lost. But we have the advantage over other people in the sense that we've got our books, we've got our previous experience, we've done this before, we have, you know, the 78 year old in our office will say, oh yes, I remember doing it like this and whatever. So we've got that in-house sort of experience and a lot of the, and so we can talk to the tradesmen and say, look, we think this is how you should do it. Let's do a little trial. In terms of sort of just conservation work, it's again experience, so we have more experience than the joiners and I was saying in this case, the joinery firm had to be a very large one and they called people, older people, that had worked there to help them out and we gave them some techniques so we told them how to remove stains, how to polish, what mixture to use in their polish and how much linseed oil you put in, how much, you know, things like that and which was, we were also, and you have to do trial runs, I didn't say that we had the answer but we knew what recipes were so we could give them the recipe and say, well, this is what we think it is, let's just give it a try and it's this process of this exchange of speaking to them and then them telling us and an old man in their shop saying, oh yes, no, I remember, my grandfather did this and it's this kind of conversation that really nurtures the whole process. It's great fun. Oh, you mean the people from our office who are working? I think we had a team of... Which firm? Donald Inslus. Now you've got me. Donald, when they did Windsor Castle which was 20 years ago, they had about 20 architects, now we have 120. So that's a scale of it. But we still, I mean, are the people who are working with Donald, including Donald himself who's 91, still come to the office so our knowledge base is still very much intact which is a great asset because records, things which are written on paper are easy to find but things that were on the DOS system and the early computers and what are just impossible to replicate. So we are very fortunate that we and then England has very good records. Regent Street is extremely well recorded both in terms of photographs because it was not just the buildings but they had to build new sewers. They had to do new underground. There is a post office train that runs underneath the Regent Street. There's a huge new sewer that was put in. So there's a whole lot of infrastructure that went in alongside that street. It wasn't just the shops and the houses and that process was really well recorded at both stages, both when that did it and then later on when it was redone in the early 20th century. England is very good about records, I must say. So we're very fortunate. Can I just ask one? When you change the size of something you said you kept the enormous essentially which kind of anchored to building on the side. When you start putting around the middle ends of the sides, do people get uptight about it? You said they, the people in residence in this area, which is sometimes you get a feeling that they quite conservative about change and coming back, allowing change to happen. You had the same problem here in the States as well, where if you, if you start tearing down the historic much earlier, starting the sounds, they're going to get subtitled about it. You're going to say, oh, this is the historic, the single, and you can't do that much to it. Is there something you're suggesting that you can, if you're negotiating, can do part of it? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Consultation, consultation, and consultation. That's basically, this is really the success. And taking people with you. So we, as you said, we had lots of tours throughout the process. And now it's becoming very popular recently at the Royal Naval Colleges. We have a building which has a painted hall and it has a wonderful painted ceiling by Thornhill. And it's being restored. And you can actually get onto the scaffold and watch the restoration taking place. So they will give you a scaffold tours. It's become the sort of the thing about public access. And I think that is why people's views are beginning to be a little bit, you know, sometimes it's quite interesting. One of the semicircular bits around Regent's Park, it's known as Regent Crescent, and it has these wonderful ionic columns around it and was again a Nash building. But one corner of it was totally bombed and lost during the war, the Second World War. And it was reconstructed in facsimile and concrete. And that building is being redeveloped again. And we are the architects for it. But in this case, the facade is being taken down because it was in the original. And the facade is being reconstructed. And we've got many letters saying, oh, look at you, you're tearing down a Nash building. Shame on you, Donald Inslee associate. And then they put a huge board on the front saying, you know, pictures of it totally lost during the Second World War because it wasn't original. So yes, people's memory also and knowledge is something that we need to sometime correct. And sometimes what they think is old and historic isn't really old and historic.