The Key Cities Innovation Network – a group of universities associated with the cross-party network of 27 Key Cities across England and Wales that represents more than 10% of the UK population – has...

Co-creating portraits of global youth in an era of change Portraits of Our Future captures a glimpse into the lives of today's global youth, hailing from two distant corners of the world – outside...

A new initiative to stimulate growth and opportunity was launched yesterday when 25 cities and towns joined with ten universities from all parts of England and Wales to form the new Key Cities...

  When Greta Thunberg said, “Build back better, blah, blah, blah”, she put her finger on the anger many people feel about fine words from our leaders in government and industry that aren’...

A memoir occasioned by the death of Mike Jackson on 16 December 2021. All pictures © Jake Bernard. Mike Jackson, 1975 In 2007 the Labour government and trade unions, having negotiated the...

An even spread of investment in culture for all towns and cities, based on their populations and weighted to tackle deprivation, is one of the most effective tools the government could use to give...

Doing Zero selected as creative commission for COP26 Global Climate Change Conference One of a growing number of community design projects in cities Download the Doing Zero project intro...

This article was first published on appg.keycities.uk Key Cities is the only APPG that looks at urban UK in the round, but many other groups make important contributions in policy areas relevant...

The railway arches at Mayfield, a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Station, is what all of Manchester was like when Urban Splash was born in 1993. So Tom Bloxham, the developer’s co-founder and CEO,...

This blog was first published on 2nq.uk. In 2019 – Finsbury Park’s 150th anniversary year – we celebrated with a programme of events including #Everything150, a contemporary archaeology...

The first ever creative collaboration between Kasper de Graaf and Malcolm Garrett – the October 1981 edition of New Sounds New Styles magazine – is featured in an exhibition opening at Nottingham...

Between the café and the lake right in the centre of Finsbury Park, 10 large A-frames present a preview exhibition of images and stories from the rich and radical heritage of this People’s Park,...

On 9 July 2019, I had the pleasure of chairing a panel and audience discussion at a well attended Manchester International Festival (MIF) breakfast event in the MIF Glass House next to Manchester...

This article first appeared as the foreword to the weekly Northern Powerhouse round-up published by Quatro on 28 June 2019 The Northern Powerhouse Mk III is just around the corner, but how will it...

The already world-class innovation assets in the South Bank corridor received a major boost before Easter when Guys’ and St Thomas’ Charity, one of the biggest landowners in the area, announced a...

This article was first published in the Oct/Nov 2018 ‘Place’ issue of Creative Review print edition. It is also available on the CR website under the title “Re-making Manchester”. In 1957, the...

How a city’s commitment to design has shaped its image on the international stage This article was first published on www.designmcr.com On Wednesday 24 October, Tottenham Hotspur played PSV...

Manchester engages design community to support its 10-year strategy. Design, like tech, is crucial to all sectors and services, says Council Leader Sir Richard Leese. New study highlights...

GCUC, the global coworking conference, has tagged South London as the capital’s “new tech hotspot” based on data from coworking marketplace Hubble. The Hubble data shows that in the year to...

In what ways can we apply design skills and thinking to help achieve the objectives set out in our city and regional strategies? At the request of Manchester City Council Leader Sir Richard Leese,...

Today, 23 June, is International Widows Day, the UN’s global day of action to fight discrimination against widows. This annual event was the brainchild of Lord Raj Loomba, whose Loomba Foundation has...

The RIBA North West Regional Awards 2017, Manchester School of ArtIn these days immediately following the mindless attack at Manchester Arena, it is impossible to write about anything Mancunian...

Why Enterprise City UK is important for all of Manchester, not just the creative entrepreneurs who will make it their base.Roundtable discussion at the launch of Enterprise City UK at Old Granada...

Stories about the impact of new thinkers, installed on the walls of KTN’s head office in Islington.Michael Faraday (1791-1867)“One of the greatest scientific discoverers of all time”Today’s digital...

Why was Smash Hits such a successful magazine when I worked there, and how has music journalism changed since then? These were the questions I was asked the other day by a student journalist at...

Asked about his slogan “I miss my pre-internet brain” in an interview with the FT, the artist Douglas Coupland observed: “I have been rewired in the last 10 or 15 years. I remember what I used to do...

The Bonded Warehouse is a looming presence in the middle of the old Granada Studios complex in Manchester city centre: a cavernous reminder of the industrial revolution, soon to be transformed into a...

Malcolm Garrett, Alan Kitching and Peter Girardi in Manchester, October 2016. Photo © Sebastian Matthes for Design ManchesterThe sound of Celia Stothard fills the room at 19 Cleaver Street in...

Playing chamber music in an art gallery is hardly unprecedented, but you know to expect something unusual when the musicians are Manchester Camerata and the gallery is the Whitworth.Henry Lamb and...

This is the speech I gave at the 25th anniversary of The Little Foundation at the House of Lords on September 21st, 2016.With fellow trustees Lord Hameed, Professor Michael Crawford and Libby Aird-...

Representatives of the creative industries in the North West convened at Manchester Metropolitan University on 28th July to discuss Brexit and ensure the government is fully informed about the...

A well-attended mini-conference of the Creative Industries Federation on July 7th 2016 at Kings College, London, called at short notice to inform CIF input and advice to the new Brexit government...

Hope against fear, was how Brexiters characterised the battle. Hope in hell versus fear of the inevitable, this is starting to look like in the sober light of day. But no-one knows what happens next...

My live updates today: 19.16 pm. Media reports all say Scotland’s First Minister is pushing for a second independence referendum, but the canny Ms Sturgeon’s position may be rather more nuanced. “I...

Living Cities, a display of works from the Collection in the George Economou Gallery on level 4 of The Switch House, curated by Ann Coxon. Above: Peter Saville’s logo for the newly expanded Tate...

June 14, 2016. What will Devo-Manc and the Northern Powerhouse mean for the cultural economy? This question was explored at The Art of Devolution: Culture and the North, a conference of arts and...

This is the full text of my obituary of dear John Benyon, who so sadly passed away a few weeks ago. The slightly shorter version published in The Telegraph is here.John Benyon at Warwick University...

Workshops with end users and service providers for an Internet of Things pilot took place at Camden Collective in London on March 9, 2016. The pilot, by the VITAL IoT consortium, explores how the...

The Loomba Foundation’s World Widows Report was launched on March 17, 2016 at the United Nations in New York by Lord Loomba, World Widows Report editor Kasper de Graaf and former UK international...

This article first appeared in On|Off published to coincide with London Fashion Week AW16, celebrating 40 years of punk. Punk sprang up all around me in Manchester, seemingly in answer to...

This article first appeared in Document 15Oct 18, 2015. Made You Look, a Look & Yes documentary by Paul O’Connor and Anthony Peters, offers a fascinating glimpse into the techniques and...

This article first appeared in Document 15Oct 16, 2015. It is the second year we’ve organised a public debate as a highlight of the Design Manchester festival – and once again, our panel underscored...

This article first appeared in Document 15Oct 15, 2015. An entire village of Grade 1 listed buildings in an inaccessible location may seem an unlikely location for a music and arts festival, but for...

Published in: Smart Cities Applications and Deployments V1 (VITAL Consortium), October 11, 2015Driven by progress in mobile technology and by structural developments in advanced economies, working...

This article appeared under the title “Obsolete?” in RSA Journal 1/2015 I was a designer in the music industry throughout the ’80s and ’90s, from before the introduction of CDs through to...

Oct 31, 2014. Organised as part of DesignManchester 14, NORTH: The Great Debate brought together national and regional leaders of the creative industries, politics and education at Manchester School...

Edinburgh chose to stay in the United Kingdom - but what will that be?“For how long will English constituencies and English Honourable members tolerate … at least 119 Honourable Members from...

“Across the globe governments and municipalities are looking at the next generation of communication and information networks and how they can use this infrastructure to help build a smart city,”...

July 21, 2014. The London partners of three international technology R&D projects gathered at a meeting hosted by IMAGES&Co at The Clarence Centre today to discuss the potential benefits of...

This was my introduction to Close & Remote’s Secure Cities discussion at Deptford Lounge on 9 May 2013.There are many reasons to be worried about security in the cities of the future.   Scarcity...

Lawless preview last night at the Curzon in Soho. At John [Hillcoat]’s insistence they screened the 35mm print (£4,000 against the £60 for the now ubiquitous digital copy which they insisted...

Building on the vision of Kevin Lynch, who formulated the legible city concept in The Image of The City (Harvard/MIT, 1960), the methodology of city wayfinding has made great strides in the past two...

In 2005, the proportion of the world’s population living in cities reached 49% (3.2 billion people). By 2030, 60% of the global population – five billion – is expected to live in urban areas. The...

Raj Loomba with the Mayor of Kigali, Dr Aisa Kirabo Kacyira and Cherie Blair, discussing the progress of a widows empowerment project in Kigali, Rwanda.This article first appeared in The London...

She may not have given Henry VIII the male heir he thought so important but, apart from giving birth to arguably the most successful monarch of the 16th century, Anne Boleyn was undoubtedly the...

The Dutch this weekend are conducting the kind of horsetrading held up by Tory newspapers before Britain’s election last month to scare us off a hung parliament. In the event, the UK quickly...

This article first appeared in Directions, the magazine of the Sign Design Society, as a report of my presentation about the UK Borders redesign.On 5 November 2008, Applied Information Group managing...

May 14, 2008. This paper was written to introduce the Policy Seminar on Public Mapping Data of the Institute of Urban Information.Attitudes to the use and availability of publicly owned information...