Recently I spoke at TEDx Manchester about the (many) mistakes I’ve made…

It would have been a very long talk if it had been a comprehensive look at my errors, but thankfully I managed to keep in my allocated time and present a look back at my Urban Splash story (which you can see here).

The subject matter made me think that its actually quite easy to go through life without ever making a mistake by never making a decision… But if you did, life wouldn’t be very interesting.

Fortunately for me, I’ve been lucky enough to make lots of decisions; be it investing my first student grant in records which I’d then resell (unsuccessfully), to doing the same with posters, to opening a bar, a night club and a radio station through to what I do now - developing old buildings. I’ve been lucky enough to have worked on some fantastic developments in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, Plymouth, Leeds, Bradford and Morecambe.

I’ve had my fair share of luck and hopefully the projects we’ve built to date bear testament to our getting out there and making a difference.

I’ve made many mistakes in all of this but what I’ve learnt is if you have a passion or project that you believe in don’t worry too much about waiting until you can do everything perfectly otherwise you’ll do nothing, don’t be afraid of making the odd mistake and in the words of ‘Nike’ “Just do it…”

I hope you enjoy watching this TEDx talk…

Today I wrote a piece for the Architects Journal on the top tips to getting the most out of MIPIM. You can read the piece below.

Tom’s top 10 tips for making the most of MIPIM 2012

Urban Splash co-founder Tom Bloxham delivers his ten top tips on how to get the most out of MIPIM…

(1) Enjoy yourself! Often the best contacts come from chance encounters and unexpected meetings.

(2) Pace yourself by planning meetings with people you definitely want to meet beforehand, but don’t cram your diary too much.

(3) Pick maybe three or four people who you want to spend quality time with, grab lunch for two on the beach and create long lasting business relationships.

(4) Pace your drinking. Perhaps more important than point (2)! Drink plenty of water, there’s a work hard/play hard balance in Cannes.

(5) Don’t forget your sandals, shades and hat. Its a fun, informal affair, dress relaxed and you’ll enjoy it more!

(6) Grab a cheeky weekend skiing at either end of MIPIM, the South of France has more to offer than just La Croissette!

(7) If skiing isn’t for you, explore the surrounding countryside or maybe the Fondation MAEGHT.

(8) Go for a paddle! The sea isn’t just for the yachts! Take in some of the calming waters while you’re at MIPIM.

(9) Make sure you get an invitation to all of the best parties, again they’re a great place to meet contacts.

(10) Make sure your primary objective is to come home with a fistful of business cards! And you must, must follow up on every single one of them when you get home.

Over 20 years ago when I started with the idea that people might want to live in Manchester and Liverpool city centres most people thought I was mad (many of those have not changed their opinion in the last 20 years either).

Everyone said no one wants to live in inner cities mainly because they thought that no one else lived there and there wouldn’t be anywhere to buy a loaf of bread. Today we’ve seen a huge change with hundreds of thousands of people living in city centres.

In Manchester, areas that were once desolate at night are now full of life and people. And it seems on every street corned there’s a deli, a corner shop or supermarket (many open 24/7!).

However 20 years on, one thing that is still missing is good city centre primary schools. Manchester is quite a good place to live if you’ve got kids of high school age because its surrounded by great secondary schools and older kids can take empty buses heading out of the city against the rush hours. But its much more problematic for primary school kids.

Cities are richer for their diversity. The best cities are not only full of young people but also full of kids and grandparents. To most people its obvious that the biggest single driver for housing choice for people with younger kids is schools so if you want to help regenerate city centres – in particular, Manchester city centre, let’s call for a bit of joined up thinking and get some great primary schools open in it.

Unfortunately I’ve been shouting this same rhetoric for the last 20 years without much success, now however I think things are changing. In New Islington just north of the city centre, we hope to start a new free school in partnership with The Manchester Grammar School (one of the country’s leading academic school) and Manchester City Council. It will be free, open to all, but priority will be given to people living close by. Its part of the Government free school initiative. It will appeal to residents both in East Manchester and the centre.

I think that this would be a great addition to New Islington; we’ve already got flats and houses, a health centre, narrowboats, a water park and a great environment. Coming soon will be the Metrolink, dozens more family houses with gardens, a bridge link to Ancoats Urban Village and hopefully a new school.

To make this happen we need to tell the Government that there’s support for it. So, if you’re interested in sending your children here, click on this link to express your interest and show your support.

To read more about the New Islington School:
- Manchester Evening News
- BBC News
- Read the MGS press release

Towns and cities are living, moving organisms and regeneration is not something that starts and finishes but something that is evolving all the time, albeit I think there sometimes is a tipping point.

In London for example, on the South Bank of the Thames where Sir Terence Conran designed Butlers Wharf and he did it really well (he’s one of my heroes!) however for many years the area was quite shabby, lifeless and not particularly attractive.

For me the tipping point came when the design museum moved in and Le Pont de la Tour restaurant opened. This meant that the streets around it started filling with people and made Butlers Wharf a destination and created a real buzz about the place.

I think we’re reaching that tipping point now at Royal William Yard in Plymouth. Like Butlers Wharf its a great collection of Georgian buildings which we started converting in 2003. Since then we have developed some great apartments there but the Yard hadn’t really been able to escape its image of being a ‘no go’ private area restricted for use only by the Navy (before Urban Splash bought it it was Ministry of Defence classified and wasn’t shown on maps!).

However in the last few months and years, we’ve been filling up the flats with residents (for sale, for sale under shared ownership and to rent). We’ve been letting out offices to architects, designers, engineers, designers  and marketing companies, we’ve brought the University of Plymouth’s art department to the scheme, we’ve welcomed temporary events like the British Art Show and the Martin Bush Gallery and new restaurants like Seco Lounge, Prezzo and Town Mill Bakery, who make Artisan bread. Today that mix has been added to with the arrival of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s Plymouth Canteen. There’s also a Marina where people can moor their boats.

With all this Royal William Yard is becoming the bustling, lively and exciting waterside venue that we had always hoped. The job is by no means finished, we’ve got great aspirations to bring more businesses in - especially small, entrepreneurial startups. We want some more retail, some more artists studios and maybe even a hotel. Here’s some details of the spaces available, get in touch if you’ve got any good ideas for any other tenants.

The job isn’t finished but I do think that we’ve reached the tipping point!

This week I had the privilege of being interviewed by Building magazine who asked me about Urban Splash, the recent years in property and some questions about hats..! You can read the full article here on the Building website, or the wording is below.

THE TOM BLOXHAM INTERVIEW

For 20 years, renowned regeneration company Urban Splash grew and grew. Then in 2008 the bottom fell out of the market and soon after the firm found itself on the ‘brink of collapse’. Its founder tells Emily Wright how it changed everything - and nothing

Tom Bloxham was, by his own admission, a very strange child. From the age of 13 he only wore clothes he found at jumble sales, he had a debilitating speech impediment and, at one point, a child psychologist told his mother she would simply have to get used to the idea that she had a “backward son”. But “like any good parent” she never lost confidence in him, says Bloxham. He worked his way successfully through a variety of industries to become, at the age of 27, founder and chairman of one of the best known developers in the UK - evidence that the man himself didn’t give up either. Today, the walls of his Manchester-based head offices are cluttered with awards and successful development plans, but it is likely to take an awful lot more than that for him to forget those formative years.

“I remember at school putting my hand up to answer questions,” he says. “And I knew I had the right answer. But no one could understand me. They had to get my sister, who was a year older, to come in and translate. I have an overriding memory of it being just so frustrating.”

Whether it was overcoming these issues that gave Bloxham hunger for success and made him into the businessman he is today, the 47-year-old won’t say. You get the impression he feels it’s an easy explanation, a cliché. Wherever his drive stems from, he has spent the last 30 years using it to make his mark in a number of industries - from selling pop posters from a stall to running a radio show - before setting up Urban Splash 20 years ago.

His life and career have mimicked the proverbial roller-coaster. First there was a long, steep and thrilling climb up through the eighties and nineties as he rose to fame as a man about town on the Manchester club scene and created a successful property development brand off the back of the regeneration boom. Then came the drop. And what a drop it was. In 2009 the value of Urban Splash was slashed by half from £92.7m to £45.5m and the developer reported a loss of £38.3m on a turnover of £49.9m - a set of results that Bloxham famously described at the time as “humbling”.

Today, he is the first to admit he just didn’t see the recession coming and hopes, “God, please”, that he won’t see anything like it again in his lifetime.

He concedes, though, that with the European and global markets in turmoil, this could be a vain hope and so, this time around, he has a survival strategy in place. And it’s a strategy that, after two decades of a marked absence from the capital, finally includes London. Here, Bloxham talks frankly about the good times and the bad, where he wants to take Urban Splash next and why he’ll still be hitting the Ibiza clubs and searching for the “ultimate hat” when he’s 50.

Then …

After 20 years of growth at Urban Splash, 2009 signalled the end of the party for Bloxham. “The last three years have been the hardest of my career,” he says. “I was in a position where I was watching the business I had spent 20 years building up on the brink of collapse. I was worried about letting other people down and the worst part was none of it was in my control. What was happening was being caused by the subprime crisis in America, the collapse of Northern Rock and the fall of the global equity markets, and I had no control over any of that.”

It became clear that the company wasn’t going to be able to survive without making changes and deep cuts: “I was constantly worried about where the money was going to come from to pay wages. I had to make a large number of people redundant and the whole experience was horrible. Absolutely horrible and something no one should have to go through. Would it have been appealing to walk away from it all to my house in the south of France for a couple of years? Yes. But that’s not my style.”

Would he have done things differently given the time again? “Ideally you would have sold in 2007, taken a huge amount of money off the table and sat quietly for a few years before coming back,” he says. “But actually that’s not really what we’re about - we have always been in it for the long term. In every project there are dozens of things we could have done better or differently. But you just have to learn and remember them for next time. You can beat yourself up but it doesn’t actually do any good.”

And now …

Bloxham is convinced that after a period of damage control and restructuring, things are looking up. He had to make dramatic changes, however. “I am a developer and I want to develop,” he says. “But that way of working isn’t necessarily the right way to move forward now.” The business instead is now 70% investment and 30% development - the opposite ratios to how it looked three years ago. The firm is open to the idea of entering into joint ventures - Bloxham says he is constantly looking for partners with deep pockets to ensure Urban Splash can continue developing. And it is this change in direction that has opened the door to London.

“We will look anywhere for the right project now and clearly the majority of development at the moment is in London and the South-east. We have always had a desire to do something here and the issue has always been the entry/acquisition cost.

“I know that lots of people have wondered for a while why we have not had much involvement with this market. There are two reasons. First, we have been so busy up until now doing stuff outside of the capital. And second, we started this business with nothing and never had the funds to buy development sites in London. We are much keener in today’s environment to do JVs than we have been in the past so London should, quite possibly, keep an eye out for us. But that’s all I can say at this stage.”

For now, the company is picking up work in some of its more familiar hotspots - Leeds and Liverpool. And of course there was the launch of the £120m Park Hill scheme last month, a 1,000-unit mixed-use renovation in Sheffield. The scheme has been described as an eyesore and has sparked plenty of criticism. But Bloxham hasn’t been knocked off course. “You have to be confident in what’s good,” he says. “It’s all subjective but if you are confident in it, then that’s what matters. And I am confident that Park Hill is good. Then, as a footballer once told me about the press: ‘Just skim read everything and no more believe the good stuff that’s written about you than worry about the bad stuff.’ I think it was David Beckham who told me that.”

In any case, Bloxham’s in fighting spirits - and given that he’s preparing for a tough few years ahead, he needs to be: “It will definitely be difficult but I am way less worried by what’s happening with the global markets than I was about the mortgage market. Because of the market we are in, we offer remarkable value for money. I am amazed when you see apartments in London going for £600 a square foot when we are selling office space for £5-£10 a square foot. That’s what people want, quality and value for money - we offer both.

“As for our financials, it’s still tough as we are building less but we have grown to 800 units in the residential lettings market, rents are rising not falling and we have let over 100,000ft2 of commercial space this year. In the year ending 31 March 2010, while turnover at Urban Splash reduced to £34.5m from £49.9m because of increased investment in its property portfolio, the company’s losses narrowed from £38.3m in 2009 to £10.3m. Total rental income rose from £10.6m to £12.7m and commercial rental increased from £9.1m to £10.6m.

“I am also very excited about my new housing idea. If that works I will want to grow this part of the business very quickly.” Bloxham is reluctant to elaborate but when pushed he smiles and says: “I want to change what a contemporary mass-built house looks like.” Surely that’s a pretty tall order? Bloxham thinks he can do it: “The vast majority of the population go and buy a Victorian terraced house then rip out the interiors to put in contemporary finishes. We want to build houses aimed at those sorts of people. It will all be brand new but with the space standards of a Victorian terrace.”

Asked whether people just prefer the look of an old Victorian house over a modern building, Bloxham sticks to his argument: “I don’t think they actually do want a Victorian house,” he says. “They want high ceilings, big windows and flexibility to knock the walls down and reconvert. And that’s what I want to create in modern developments.”

Man about town …

His business may have changed over the years, but Bloxham has remained largely the same. He says he dresses in the exact same way he did when he was 15 - around the time he developed a penchant for the pork pie hats that have become his trademark. He stopped wearing them for a while, he says, because he worried they made him look ostentatious. But as he began to lose his hair, he reinstated them. And now, at the age of 47, he is still on the hunt for the “ultimate hat”. He hasn’t found it yet, but there are a couple in his 100-strong collection that he rates pretty highly. The problem is that he tends to lose them. “I lost one in Ibiza when we were there for my friend’s 50th and I lost one in a club in Monaco. That’s the thing - people in clubs ask to try them on and you let them. Then you get a bit drunk, the hat gets passed on and you forget to follow it.

“I wear the hats because my grandfather always used to say ‘if you want to get ahead, get a hat’. But also because I always have done. I try not to be anyone I am not and the hat was part of my look when I was young. I haven’t changed since then, really.”

Except for the getting ahead, obviously.