About

People | Spaces | Places is a study of the built environment by Harriet Walker-Arnott, a real estate development adviser working in Central London.

I am, frankly, obsessed with architecture and the impact the built environment has on us humans, in every moment of every day.

My aim is to understand why some buildings make us happy and endure the centuries. When other buildings induce despair and decline in a matter of years. I am hoping that by examining this, I can learn how to create the former and transform the latter.

Q//Success is on the far side of failure//

T.J. Watson, founder of IBM

People say that to work things out you need to try, fail, learn this failure, refine and try again.

This is a great model when you are writing or creating or building websites – anything impermanent and easily editable. Ideally I would find my answer to “what makes a great place” by building a building, learning the good and the bad, knocking it down and building a better building.

Obviously this is practically and morally unfeasible. A waste of resource, time and energy. And so instead I am hoping to use the methods of research and reflection to understand where places have failed and where they have succeeded, to avoid the former and replicate the latter.

I accept there are some things I will only ever learn from the sheer experience of building somewhere, seeing it go wrong and learning from my mistakes. However I hope that by reflecting on the mistakes of others, I can minimise my own and learn how to create truly wonderful places.

[Note Bene – Every view and opinion I express is entirely my own and does not reflect that of my employer…]