Grow Places

Welcome to the Grow Places podcast where we explore the virtuous circle of people growth and place. Brought to you by Grow Places and hosted by our Founder, Tom Larsson. These short conversations with industry leaders and community figures share insights on the built environment and open up about their purpose and what drives them on a personal level. Thank you for listening. For more information please visit our website; www.growplaces.com and connect with us @WeGrowPlaces across all social channels. We cover topics such as real estate, property development, place, urban design, architecture, social value, sustainability, community, technology, diversity, philanthropy, landscape design, public realm, cities, urban development, people, neighbourhoods, anthropology, sociology, geography, culture, circular economy, whole life carbon, affordability, business models, innovation, impact, futurism, mindset, leadership, mentorship, wellbeing. See you next tim

Grow Places is a business podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 67 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts Grow Places, a business show with 67 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  Grow Places

  GP67: Live Life in the Yellow: with Nick Searl

  Jul 27, 20261h 4m

  Nick Searl spent over two decades at Argent, where he played a central role in the development of King's Cross, one of the UK's most significant regeneration projects. He now advises Urban Partners, a Copenhagen based investment business, on large scale urban regeneration across Europe. Reflecting on a Radio 4 programme about the lost art of getting lost, Nick makes the case for a different relationship with uncertainty, one where the goal isn't to eliminate risk but to become comfortable working within it. As he puts it, we live life in the yellow, not the red or the green. He carries that thinking through to how cities and developers plan for the long term, arguing that the only certainty over a fifteen or twenty year delivery period is that the social, economic and political context will change significantly. The conversation covers the King's Cross Principles, a shared manifesto written over twelve months with English Heritage and Camden Council before a single drawing was produced, the most basic finding from King's Cross community engagement, that people wanted, above all else, to feel safe and secure, and the case for co-creation over adversarial relationships between developers, cities and investors. Nick closes with a personal reflection on stepping back from a long, structured career and finding a new sense of purpose through coaching and advisory work. In this episode: Why we should get more comfortable living in the grey, or the yellow, rather than demanding certainty The King's Cross Principles and why the process mattered more than the plan What a thousand people told Argent they actually wanted from King's Cross Why the adversarial mindset between developers and cities holds regeneration back Reflections on identity, purpose and reinvention after a long career

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Grow Places

  GP 66: Built Environment Sector is Critical to UK Growth: with Nick McKeogh of NLA

  Jul 6, 202646 min

  In this episode of the Grow Places Podcast, Tom Larsson is joined by Nick McKeogh, co-founder and Chief Executive of NLA, to explore two decades of building a civic institution dedicated to bringing together everyone who shapes the built environment. Nick reflects on NLA's origins around London's 2005 Olympic bid, born from a simple observation: the professionals who plan, design, fund and build the city rarely had a shared space to think together, and Londoners themselves were often left out of the conversation entirely. The discussion unpacks NLA's "three Ps" framework for successful placemaking, people, place and purpose, and why starting with people rather than form or finance leads to better outcomes. Nick shares striking research showing the built environment sector accounts for 25% of UK GVA and one in eight jobs, yet remains fragmented across professions that rarely see themselves as part of one industry. He discusses NLA's shift towards "systems leadership," the idea that no single visionary shapes a great city, but rather thousands of collaborating actors, and explores common misconceptions held by developers, architects, communities and politicians about one another. Nick also traces his personal route into this work, beginning as a child in his father's architectural model-making business during the early 1990s recession, and reflects on the enduring power of physical models to inspire young people in an increasingly screen-based world. The conversation closes with his ambition for a global network of NLA-style institutions, and a call for the industry to slow down and invest time upfront in genuine conversation, arguing that patience and trust-building ultimately deliver better places, faster.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Grow Places

  GP 65: Communicate in Primary Colours: Plain English in Complex Institutions, with Muyiwa Oki of Mace

  Jun 22, 202636 min

  In this episode, Tom Larsson is joined by Muyiwa Oki, architect, former RIBA president, and now at Mace, to explore what it takes to reform a 200-year-old institution from the inside, why technical grounding matters more than ever for architects, and how the built environment can better serve the communities it shapes. Muyiwa traces a deliberate route through smaller practices, building technical foundations before moving into large-scale infrastructure delivery at Mace. He shares what drove him to stand for the RIBA presidency, a campaign rooted in the uncompensated overtime that defined his generation's experience of the profession, and how holding that role sharpened his ability to lead, communicate, and advocate under pressure. The conversation covers the barriers that continue to narrow who enters architecture: the length and cost of training, and the structural gap between education and practice. Muyiwa makes the case for level seven apprenticeships, for building regulations to be embedded in architectural education, and for architects to embrace the principal designer role as a step towards reclaiming responsibility across the full project lifecycle. Tom and Muyiwa also examine what makes public space genuinely work, the risk of hyper-financialisation in the built environment, and why leaving room for people to inhabit places as they choose may be the most honest measure of whether a place was really designed for them. Recorded at the Barbican, London.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Grow Places

  GP 64: Team London: Why is London Such a Draw with Rose Wangen-Jones of London and Partners

  Jun 1, 202635 minS0

  <p>In this episode, Tom sits down with Rose Wangen-Jones, Managing Director for Marketing, Destination and Commercial at London and Partners, the growth agency for London. They meet in Southwark to talk about what makes London genuinely distinctive, how the city manages its brand at scale, and the shared responsibility required to keep one of the world's great cities competitive, inclusive and resilient.</p><p>Rose explains how London and Partners approaches its mission to create economic growth that is sustainable and inclusive, and why the city's brand rests on the combination of the iconic and the innovative. The conversation...

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Grow Places

  GP 63: Building for Society: with Simon Henley of Henley Halebrown

  May 18, 202654 minS0

  <p>This episode takes its title from Henley Halebrown's recently published book, Building for Society, and we are privileged to have worked closely with Simon and the practice for over a decade, aligning elegant and economic buildings with the needs of people and place.</p><p>In this episode of the Grow Places Podcast, Tom Larsson is joined by Simon Henley, Director of Henley Halebrown, at the practice's studio in Perseverance Works, East London. Simon reflects on thirty years of practice built around a deceptively simple conviction: that every building, regardless of its budget or brief, is fundamentally for people...

  ListenShow Notes

Recent guests on Grow Places. Study who booked and why before you pitch.

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.