In this episode, Tom Larsson is joined by Muyiwa Oki, architect, former RIBA president, and now at Mace, to explore what it takes to reform a 200-year-old institution from the inside, why technical grounding matters more than ever for architects, and how the built environment can better serve the communities it shapes.

Muyiwa traces a deliberate route through smaller practices, building technical foundations before moving into large-scale infrastructure delivery at Mace. He shares what drove him to stand for the RIBA presidency, a campaign rooted in the uncompensated overtime that defined his generation's experience of the profession, and how holding that role sharpened his ability to lead, communicate, and advocate under pressure.

The conversation covers the barriers that continue to narrow who enters architecture: the length and cost of training, and the structural gap between education and practice. Muyiwa makes the case for level seven apprenticeships, for building regulations to be embedded in architectural education, and for architects to embrace the principal designer role as a step towards reclaiming responsibility across the full project lifecycle.

Tom and Muyiwa also examine what makes public space genuinely work, the risk of hyper-financialisation in the built environment, and why leaving room for people to inhabit places as they choose may be the most honest measure of whether a place was really designed for them.

Recorded at the Barbican, London.

In this episode, Tom sits down with Rose Wangen-Jones, Managing Director for Marketing, Destination and Commercial at London and Partners, the growth agency for London. They meet in Southwark to talk about what makes London genuinely distinctive, how the city manages its brand at scale, and the shared responsibility required to keep one of the world's great cities competitive, inclusive and resilient.

Rose explains how London and Partners approaches its mission to create economic growth that is sustainable and inclusive, and why the city's brand rests on the combination of the iconic and the innovative. The conversation covers the London Growth Plan and its five identified growth sectors, including the experience economy, which Rose argues is the foundation everything else depends on. They discuss the concept of Team London, a coordinated effort to align messaging across partners, businesses and institutions so that more people are telling London's story consistently and well.

Tom and Rose also explore the harder questions: the risks of complacency, the challenge of disinformation, the tension between growth and affordability, and what it takes to develop a city in a way that genuinely benefits the people who live there. Rose shares her perspective on placemaking, investment clusters, and the work of sister organisation Opportunity London in attracting long-term capital to the city.

They close with a question about what London should build next, and what it might look like if the city expanded its footprint beyond the West End to offer more people access to the experiences that make it worth coming to, and worth staying in.

This episode takes its title from Henley Halebrown's recently published book, Building for Society, and we are privileged to have worked closely with Simon and the practice for over a decade, aligning elegant and economic buildings with the needs of people and place.

In this episode of the Grow Places Podcast, Tom Larsson is joined by Simon Henley, Director of Henley Halebrown, at the practice's studio in Perseverance Works, East London. Simon reflects on thirty years of practice built around a deceptively simple conviction: that every building, regardless of its budget or brief, is fundamentally for people and for society. From early work in interiors and adaptive reuse through to award-winning schools, health centres, co-housing and housing, he traces a career shaped as much by accident and curiosity as by intention, and explains how writing, teaching and practice fuel one another. The conversation explores how Henley Halebrown's recurring interest in courtyards, external circulation and civic responsibility has produced buildings that are both elegant and economic, solving practical problems around efficiency, microclimate and construction while elevating the experience of everyday life.

The discussion also delves into collaboration and the culture of design teams, with Simon reflecting on the value of intimate, discursive project meetings where people feel free to pose questions and challenge the status quo. Drawing on projects from the Hackney school that stayed open at 40 degrees to the Copper Lane co-housing scheme, from the Truman Brewery to the newly completed Barge Crescent on the South Bank, he demonstrates how buildings can reflect the social logic of the organisations and communities they serve. Simon also shares insights from his time chairing the RIBA awards judging panel, where he helped rewrite the criteria to ask better questions about what makes a good building. Looking ahead, he describes the practice's work in Winchester with Igloo, Peter Barber and Turner Works on what he believes will be the greatest transformation of the city in a thousand years, not through scale, but through the careful repair of streets, squares and medieval waterways. Ambitious yet grounded, his message is clear: keep your feet on the ground and your head in the clouds.