Making Places That Feel Like Home

Martyn Evans has had the privilege of working on some of the most interesting places imaginable across the course of his career. From 11 abandoned, ex-industrial acres of London at the Old Truman Brewery in Brick Lane, through EMI’s historic manufacturing site in West London to the South Devon countryside, when he had a very successful midlife crisis and dropped out of the London property rat race to run a 1,200-acre historic estate with 1m sqft of vulnerable buildings, a forestry business, a farm with 500 goats and half a million visitors a year.

Martyn will talk about what binds all those places – people and their happiness – and how we, as shapers of place have a responsibility to use stories from the past, a clear understanding of the problems of the now to create the solutions of the future. “We can’t just be property developers, architects, engineers and landscape designers”, he maintains. “We have to be agents of socio-economic change, making places that create the opportunity for people to live good lives.”

Martyn is Creative Director at U+I, the specialist mixed-use regeneration developer that is part of the Landsec Group. Martyn spent 17 years with Cathedral Group, now U+I, including six years on the board before leaving to become the Development Director at the 1,200-acre Dartington Hall Estate in Devon in 2016.