Recently in Regeneration Mafia Category

One of the great things about becoming EG Regeneration blogger is the way it allows me to keep up with old friends.

I really was thrilled to hear from Brian Jenner (of Paddington days) again the other day. I had indeed forgotten that he had called for the erection of a bronze statue of me on the forecourt of Paddington Station.

However, he was also reported as kindly suggesting that "such was your appetite for an urban regeneration challenge, they should send you to Baghdad". 

It was very very funny then and it's nice to be reminded now, Brian, very nice indeed. And, btw, my mother thought the statue idea was an excellent one.

We've also gone international!  Wonderful to hear from my old mate Lee Swan (rather more grandly known as "Ashleigh Swan" on occasion).

I am now at a strange point in my life of finding myself an eminence grise in the regeneration sector. Anyone who knows me will attest that this is not something I'm terrifically comfortable with, having got a life-long self-image of being an "urban guerrilla" banging on the door of the mainstream property sector. After all, I started my adult life with a bubble perm, Doctor Martins, red dungarees and a badge saying "wearing badges is not enough" and, frankly, I am still that rather absurd girlie underneath.

So I found it very odd indeed when that venerable old man of the sea, Howard Day (fag hanging out of his mouth of course) said incredulously (this was while we were doing Paddington, he was with Railtrack at the time but he does get about; he's the only person I know who has worked for both Godfrey Bradman and Stuart Lipton not - I hasten to add - at the same time) "Blimey Jack, you're becoming establishment". And although I didn't believe him at the time, I guess I really am now. After all, I chair the trade federation (hurrah!) and I'm Head of Regeneration for CB Richard Ellis, biggest real estate consultancy in the world (so ner) so I guess I'd better wake up and smell the hummus.

And it's rather nice being an eminence grise, of course. Students write to me to ask me for careers advice. Bless. What would I know? I hugely enjoy lecturing the APCs (the "Assessment of Professional Competence" cohort - or, in English, the graduate trainees) in CBRE. I lurve lurve lurve the CBRE APCs, they are the brightest and most sassy group of young people you could care to meet. Completely energising and stimulating to be around. Graduate recruitment is something that CBRE do brilliantly well - it's taken a bit of battering in recent times of course but I have no doubt they'll be back out in the colleges before long.

Was invited out to lunch with Peter Brett Associates (PBA) at Mosimann's, which was a rare treat as I'd never been there before. I have always had a soft spot for the Brett boys - they're a user-friendly bunch and they like a bit of knockabout humour - which is just as well really. I am always very rude to the lads - it's tradition really - and they never care; they're unoffendable really.

After we'd got over the preliminaries of me saying that I "couldn't possibly eat lunch in a dump like that" and "why-oh-why after three decades was I still slumming it with boring transport engineers" etc etc, we settled down to a real working lunch on energy and ecology. This was far from a pure jolly-up (although it was very jolly too of course) but was a real opportunity to listen, learn and debate some issues facing the future of the regeneration sector.

We received two very different technical presentations - one on energy production and one on biodiversity - and then had a fascinating round table discussion. I found I learnt A Lot from the presentations, the most exciting idea being that corporates' property portfolios can be treated as single cross-subsidising entities in terms of production of energy for the National Grid. Given the shake-up that we're going to see in among the FTSE 500 corporates' use of real estate, this is a major contribution to thinking. And - says she, a tad hubristically - to the future of the planet.