Thomas Heatherwick: ‘The city will be a new kind of space’

Thomas Heatherwick is the urban designer behind some of the world's most pioneering landmarks. He talks about soulfulness' in cities, heart-centred' offices - and seducing people into being together again

During the past year, the beguiling urban designer Thomas Heatherwick has, along with just about everyone else, spent many hours walking alone in empty streets, wondering what happens next. One of the thoughts that has bounced around in his head on those walks has been this: Many people are realising that they may hardly have to go anywhere ever again." A consequence of that realisation - the conclusion of the enforced mass experiment of working and socialising and shopping from your kitchen table - will, he believes, cause a lot of hard-nosed businessmen" to confront a question that has been fundamental to his own thinking ever since he set up in practice 27 years ago. What might make people want to come to this place?"

Heatherwick is talking to me from his studio in King's Cross, London, an area that he is helping to reimagine on a grand scale: his Coal Drops Yard development, an upscale shopping and cafe complex landscaped and wow-factored from blackened-brick Victorian warehousing, opened in 2018; nearby his co-design for the new Google UK campus, a landscraper" with a rooftop park, is slowly taking shape. The studio wall behind him is alive with ferns and trailing plants that half-cover schoolroom maps of the world - a potted version of the cascades of foliage and trees that are integrated into many of his city centre designs, including his ill-fated Garden Bridge across the Thames.