Simon Silver would like to make it clear that he is not retiring.
Yes, he is stepping down from his role as an executive director at Derwent London, the company he co-founded with step-brother John Burns more than three decades ago. Yes, he will now be able to avoid the drawn-out board meetings that come with life on the public markets – “three and a half hours!”. Yes, he is speaking to EG via Zoom as he clears out his desk at the company’s Savile Row office. But retiring? Give him a break.
So EG should apologise for using that very term six months ago when covering the announcement of his February departure. But we weren’t the only ones.
“A lot of people misread the announcement as that I’m retiring,” Silver says. “I was at pains to explain that I’m stepping down as a director and giving up my directorship duties, but staying on as a consultant. I kept saying on the phone, ‘I haven’t retired!’ I don’t like the R word.”
Silver, as should now be apparent, doesn’t really seem to switch off. Derwent said last year that he would hold his new consultancy role until the end of 2022. But in conversation, he’s now talking about it lasting for as long as three years, highlighting yet-to-be-started projects he longs to work on, including an upcoming scheme in Brixton, SW9.
It’s not that Silver is a control freak. This desire to keep close to the work of the company he helped to build is what you would expect from a man as plugged into property as he is. A man whose mobile phone’s photo gallery has folders with labels like “stonework” and “lighting” to file snaps of sites that have caught his eye and which he wants to inspire colleagues and contractors. A man whose clear love of the built environment likely lies behind the fact that two of his three children have followed him into the industry.
Time waits for no man
Despite not yet calling it a day, Silver is nonetheless in a reflective mood as he enters the next stage of his career.
“You do reminisce on certain periods that you have a fondness for,” he says. “I certainly remember the call when John Burns phoned me and said, ‘I’ve just bought this practice and I wonder whether you would be interested in starting an office department – do you know enough?’ And I lied through my teeth.”
That practice was Pilcher Hershman, an estate agency that Burns bought in the early 1970s. Silver had been working elsewhere as an agent, leasing small spaces and earning small commissions in return. He made the move.
Ten years later, in 1984, Burns and Silver founded their own venture together by floating a property business through the former operating company of the Derwent Valley Light Railway Company. It was valued at about £5m. “I remember thinking ‘I’ve arrived, this is it!’” Silver recalls. “We were publicly listed. It was really exciting.”
Derwent Valley became the company known today a little over two decades later when it bought London Merchant Securities in a £1bn deal to form Derwent London.
Since then, it has been difficult not to associate the company closely with Burns and Silver, both of whom have for years shown such an obvious passion for the places they create. I remember interviewing them some years ago about their Crossrail development plans and they spoke over each other and finished each other’s sentences so often it was almost impossible to pull a complete quote out of the conversation.
But the company’s leadership is now changing. Silver’s shift at Derwent comes after Burns himself stepped down as chairman, having stood aside as chief executive in 2019 to be replaced by Paul Williams. The company is now chaired by Mark Breuer, a former JP Morgan banker.
Sometimes, Silver says, you simply know the time is right for change. “I remember John said to me when he stood down, ‘I’ve run the company a long time, it’s time for the next generation to take over,’” he says. “I sort of feel the same way. I’ve had amazing years at Derwent. It has been brilliant. And we’ve got a great team here – there’s a wonderful legacy, I hope, and they’ll continue in the same vein.”
Today the FTSE 250 business’s portfolio spans 5.6m sq ft and was valued at £5.4bn as of its most recent interim results last summer. Its share price has suffered during the pandemic, but its market capitalisation of £3.5bn makes it one of the five largest London-listed REITs, and the second largest in the FTSE 250.
Such accomplishments register with Silver, but he admits that he has never been much of a PLC type of guy. “If I’m being really honest, I didn’t have that corporate sort of persona or feel,” he says. “I was very, very lucky that I could pursue my own trail, and it became design and architecture and working with all these wonderful architects and helping produce buildings.”
The pull of a good office
For Silver, the conversation always comes back to those buildings; the sites Derwent is known for – the Tea Building in Shoreditch, E1, the White Collar Factory, EC1, the Brunel Building, W2, – and those still to come, such as projects at Brixton or Baker Street, NW1, or the Featherstone Building on Old Street, EC1.
Derwent’s mission, as Silver puts it, has been to take tired offices and make them exciting. Now, as the Covid-19 pandemic drives a year-long, heated debate over the future of the workplace, he remains excited about these places.
“What a good office atmosphere does – apart from mental health issues and feeling good and coming into a great place to work – is make you more productive,” he says.
“If you’re in an office environment that is happy, has lots of amenity, then you work harder. You work longer hours without even thinking about it because you enjoy the place so much. The great thing about making great office spaces for other companies is that they too will be even more productive in that building because of everything it offers.”
That sentiment is in line with every other London office owner and agent, of course. But Silver is not ignoring the possibility of change. The pandemic will undoubtedly alter aspects of how offices look and are run, he adds – just perhaps by less than some people have thought.
“I don’t think [office space] is going to change dramatically [due to Covid], but I think it is going to change for the better. It’s going to take on a lot of the problems that we’ve been facing and hopefully solve them. It’s another period of hopefully great creativity for a lot of people.”
He adds: “Until architects have come up with a blueprint for how an office should be in the next five years, I don’t think it’s signed off. I think there are so many ideas flying around from all sorts of different sources. You’ve got to sit down and pick out the common denominators that you really feel are important.”
To London with love
One factor important to Silver is the sense of community that the built environment can encourage. When he last spoke with EG, he said that his friends and associates would still find him in the West End for breakfast in his new role. What is it about the city and its spaces that still grabs him?
“I love Mayfair, I love the West End, I generally love central London,” he says. “It’s got culture, it’s got retail – not at the moment, of course – it’s got phenomenal social interaction. I’ve been here for years, I go around the corner to some very modest sandwich shop and I know them all. It’s a part of your life. It’s so simple, but it’s so important.”
Derwent has focused in its schemes on the “village” feel of different areas of London, Silver adds, a vibe that he looks for wherever he goes in the capital. “If you’re on a lunch break, you’ve got 40 minutes to waste and you’re wandering around, the West End is just fantastic,” he says. “It’s a fabulous place. I get a buzz every time. I love being a Londoner.”
No surprise, then, that Silver is a resolute optimist on the outlook for London and for cities more generally. And, as with offices, he believes that London itself will be changed less by Covid that some observers predict.
“I’m definitely a glass-half-full sort of person,” he says. “There could be a lot of ups and downs in the interim. But when [London] bounces back, as undoubtedly it will, I think it will revert close to norm. I think everything that made it popular in the first place will return.”
Pen to paper
Silver may not be retiring, but he will have a bit more time on his hands, particularly if he isn’t needed in those board meetings.
He is flexing some new creative muscles, putting together a book titled Journeys Into Architecture – 10 or so essays and photographs of non-Derwent buildings that have inspired him. Paris’s Maison de Verre will be in there, as will Le Corbusier’s La Tourette monastery and the Seagram building on New York’s Park Avenue. He hopes to give some copies to the British Architectural Library and to share the rest with friends.
But although that will keep him busy for a few months, before long he’ll be back to advising Derwent on upcoming projects – and he clearly wouldn’t want it any other way.
With too much ground still to cover and too little time, I ask Silver about the company’s decision last year to give the apartments at its 80 Charlotte Street development free of charge to University College Hospital during the pandemic. It was simply the right decision, he says, “just something we should do”, and shareholders understood that the lost income was worth the greater good.
“It’s really funny you mention that,” Silver adds – just before he came on the line to EG, as he emptied his desk, he came across a postcard sent by a contact in the NHS who worked on the initiative with Derwent, thanking the company.
“That gives me as much pleasure, honestly, as doing a good deal,” he says after sharing a few lines of the note. “Sometimes stuff like that really gets to you.”
It’s a good job Silver isn’t calling it quits quite yet – real estate could do with even more of that attitude.
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