Nick Walkley loves the property industry, but when the chief executive of Homes England sits down with EG’s Tomorrow’s Leaders podcast, he admits: “Some pretty disgraceful things have been normalised.”
“We don’t work hard enough to ensure that women are offered leadership roles. We don’t think convincingly enough about what it will mean to be a returner to work following a period of child care,” he says.
And that is just part of a wider problem. The make-up of leading developers and regeneration specialists is overwhelmingly white, male and middle class – like Walkley himself – while the places they redevelop and the people affected tend to be far more diverse.
But he and Tim Heatley, co-founder of developer Capital & Centric, have teamed up to tackle that problem head-on.
Last summer, Capital & Centric launched Regeneration Brainery, a scheme that pairs 16-21 year-olds – consciously chosen from a diverse range of social, economic and ethnic backgrounds – with mentors from across the industry. Now, Homes England has come on board as a trustee as a way, Walkley says, of getting involved and showing leadership in this area.
Engaging with the excluded
He says: “If we’re serious about a sector that’s more inclusive, a good place to start is by actually engaging with some of those who might otherwise be excluded. It’s really easy to write a plan. It’s an awful lot harder to do the doing.”
This Easter the Brainery ran its first week-long session of workshops, workplace visits and talks from mentors in Manchester, giving young people the opportunity to experiment with careers they might not otherwise have considered. That particularly resonates with Heatley, who trained as a lawyer before realising he wanted a more creative career.
“It’s not so much to teach them how to be, for example, an architect or how to be a property lawyer, but it’s more to teach them what the individuals’ journey was,” Heatley says. “If you’re from a council estate in Old Trafford, you’re not necessarily going to have the chance to talk to five or six different big architects who are well-known in their field.
“When you get the chance to do that, you might think, ‘That’s a good idea. I’ll enjoy this’, or you might think it’s a horrendous idea.”
Following on from Manchester, Heatley and his team are planning to run two more week-long courses this year, the first of which is likely to be in Birmingham. After that “San Tropez,” Nick Walkley suggests.
Seeing the future
One of the exercises in the Brainery involves re-imagining a part of a city. That, Heatley says, gives a glimpse into the future of placemaking and what young people think is important.
“They’re very experience orientated. They consume through the internet in terms of purchasing things, but they want lots of experiences,” he says.
Libraries are a key part of their designs, as are coffee shops. “That’s their new church on a Sunday. That’s where they see their mates and their family,” Heatley says, although he jokes there is “definitely an overuse of skate parks” in their plans – apt considering Heatley’s own pair of bright green skate shoes that he wore to the podcast recording.
The important thing is that Brainery brings people of different ages and backgrounds together to reconsider their thinking and what the future of property might look like. Heatley says: “I learn a hell of a lot from spending time with these young adults, as do the mentors. It’s a real two-way street.”
For more on Regeneration Brainery, “positive discrimination” and Heatley’s regrets of training as a lawyer, listen to the latest Tomorrow’s Leaders podcast.
Tim and Nick’s life lessons
■ Work for people you respect: “You don’t have to work for crap people. Never think that’s a necessary part of your career.” – Nick Walkley
■ Figure out what you love doing: “Think a little more smartly about why you want to work in a place and what it’s going to offer you. What’s the delight you’re going to get out of this beyond the financial compensation?” – Nick Walkley
■ Don’t be afraid of pursuing something new: “I learned I wasn’t good at what I trained to do and the hard thing is to acknowledge it, accept it and walk away from what you were trained to do and walk into something else.” – Tim Heatley
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