London Calling. London Walks Connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead. Storytime. History Time.
Look around London.
Lloyd’s.
The Cheesegrater.
Terminal 5.
One Hyde Park.
The Dome.
The British Museum’s World Conservation and Exhibitions Centre.
Richard Rogers is everywhere.
He didn’t just leave his mark on London.
He helped reinvent its skyline.
But here’s the thing.
The man who changed modern London arrived here as a five-year-old refugee. He couldn’t speak a word of English. His family had fled Mussolini’s Italy. They washed up in Notting Hill with little more than the clothes they were wearing.
They lived in a single room in a boarding house.
There was even a bath in the room.
Hot water came from a meter that swallowed shillings.
They didn’t always have enough shillings.
It’s one of those London stories that seems almost impossible to reconcile with what came later.
Richard Rogers would go on to win architecture’s highest honour, the Pritzker Prize. He’d be knighted. Made a life peer. He’d become Lord Rogers of Riverside.
And he’d help change not just London’s skyline but the way architects thought about buildings.
His great insight was beautifully simple.
Buildings shouldn’t be frozen in time.
They should be able to change.
Take Lloyd’s.
Most office buildings hide their guts. The lifts. The pipes. The air conditioning. The wiring.
Richard Rogers did exactly the opposite.
He put them on the outside.
It looked revolutionary.
But there was a practical reason.
Lifts wear out. Electronics become obsolete. Air conditioning has to be replaced. Put those things on the outside and you can swap them out without dismantling the building. The building lives longer. It adapts.
That’s classic Richard Rogers.
Radical.
But never merely for the sake of being radical.
He once said that if an idea came to him in the bath, it was usually wrong. Architecture, he insisted, was a slow process.
And perhaps that’s why so much of his work has lasted.
Mind you, there was very little in his childhood to suggest he’d become one of the world’s greatest architects.
He was dyslexic.
He didn’t properly learn to read until he was about eleven.
At school he was miserable.
He was foreign.
Homesick.
Unable to keep up.
Teachers mistook dyslexia for stupidity.
One careers adviser had a memorable suggestion.
Richard Rogers should become… “a policeman in South Africa.”
He later admitted he found that rather odd.
Especially as he was a pacifist.
Then came National Service.
He joined the Army as a private.
He left the Army…
as a private.
He joked that achieving that was “very, very difficult in the army.”
Life, however, has a habit of ignoring careers advisers.
While serving in Trieste he met the distinguished architect Ernesto Rogers. No relation, despite the surname.
That encounter changed everything.
For the first time, architecture suddenly seemed possible. It brought together the two halves of his personality: science and engineering on one side, art and imagination on the other.
He won a place at the Architectural Association.
Then Yale.
There he met another young architect who would become a lifelong friend and, for a while, his partner.
Norman Foster.
Not a bad pairing.
The two young men would go on to shape modern architecture around the globe.
Their careers diverged.
Their friendship endured.
Then came the commission that changed everything.
A competition in Paris.
Six hundred and eighty-one entries.
Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano almost didn’t bother entering.
They won.
The building was the Pompidou Centre.
Today it’s one of the most visited buildings in Europe.
But when it was unveiled…
people hated it.
The critics tore it to pieces.
Rogers later admitted he was terrified nobody would even go inside.
Then something extraordinary happened.
The public arrived.
In their millions.
Only then did the critics change their minds.
And London was watching.
…When Richard Rogers came back to London after the triumph of the Pompidou Centre, he could have settled almost anywhere.
He chose Chelsea.
He and his wife, Ruth, bought a late Georgian house.
Actually, they bought two.
And then they proceeded to do something very Richard Rogers.
As Ruth liked to put it, “Most people buy barns and turn them into houses. We bought a house and turned it into a barn.”
Walls disappeared.
The interior became one great flowing space.
We pass it on our Chelsea Walk. It was one of those OMG look at that when you spotted the huge Andy Warhol Chairman Mao painting taking up practically a whole wall.
The kitchen became the heart of the home.
That mattered.
Because for Richard Rogers, architecture wasn’t about showing off.
It was about how people lived.
He wasn’t much of a cook himself.
Ruth was.
He loved watching her cook.
He said the hearth of the house was the kitchen and the kitchen was the living room.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same philosophy that runs through all his work.
Buildings should bring people together.
Cities should bring people together.
Architecture wasn’t about concrete.
It wasn’t about steel.
It certainly wasn’t about ego.
It was about human beings.
That comes across again and again in every interview he ever gave.
He famously said the closest thing to hell he could imagine was staying alone in one of those anonymous international hotels.
“I think if I had to say what hell is,” he said, “staying in an international hotel somewhere… is absolute hell.”
He loved conversation.
Noise.
Family.
Friends.
Life.
Which explains another extraordinary London institution.
The legendary River Café in Hammersmith.
Ruth Rogers founded it.
It began as the canteen for Richard Rogers’s architectural practice.
Today it’s one of Britain’s great restaurants.
Richard loved being there.
Not simply for the food.
For the people.
And that brings us to what I think is the most revealing thing Richard Rogers ever said.
He wasn’t asked about one of his buildings.
He was asked what he’d do if someone gave him a free hand to redesign London.
His answer wasn’t, “I’d build a taller skyscraper.”
Or, “I’d build another museum.”
No.
He talked about parks.
Squares.
Trees.
He wanted to reclaim the Thames.
He imagined burying the traffic along the Embankment and replacing it with one long riverside park stretching from Westminster towards the City.
He wanted arcades.
Pedestrian routes.
Places where people would meet.
Talk.
Linger.
Fall in love.
Simply enjoy being together.
He believed London’s greatest treasures weren’t its buildings.
They were its public spaces.
Its greenery.
Its parks.
Its squares.
Its humanity.
Of course, not everything he wanted came to pass.
But plenty did.
Let’s double back.
Look around London today.
Lloyd’s.
The Cheesegrater.
Terminal 5.
One Hyde Park.
The Millennium Dome.
The British Museum’s World Conservation and Exhibitions Centre.
They’re very different buildings.
But they all speak the same language.
Flexible.
Optimistic.
Fearlessly modern.
Confident enough not to imitate the past.
Confident enough to create something new.
And perhaps that’s Richard Rogers’s greatest legacy.
Not any one building.
An attitude.
A belief that cities can always become better.
Kinder.
Greener.
More generous.
More human.
And why today?
Because today, July 23rd, is Richard Rogers’s birthday.
He was born on this day in 1933.
Happy Birthday, Richard Rogers.
Thank you for the skyline.
But even more…
thank you for reminding us that a great city isn’t ultimately about buildings.
It’s about the people who use them.
That’s London.
Always reinventing itself.
Just as Richard Rogers believed it should.
See you tomorrow.
Do come along. We’ll be doing our own little bit of reinventing London. Conjuring it up. Bringing part of it back.