JOHN SORRELL leans across the table as if about to confess the meaning of life. “You know what, creativity can change lives,” he says, managing to add genuine sincerity to what could so easily seem like cheesy truisms.
Sorrell was born on a council estate in North London, father a milkman. Now he lives down the road but worlds apart, in possibly the sexiest pad in the capital. The Lawns has it all. Richer-than-thou position high up in Highgate. Glass by the acre. Design awards. Impeccable decor. Ethereal rooftop think space in floaty white and glass, bleaching into the clouds. All this he owes to creativity.
This week, thanks in part to him, London anoints itself creative capital, with so much arty brainpower crammed within the M25 that it could explode in a modern Renaissance. There’s London Fashion Week, of course, while at the TUC headquarters today, the portentously titled World Creative Forum has big cheeses such as Sir Christopher Frayling, Jude Kelly and Neil Kinnock hammering out such topics as diplomacy, internationalism and creative countries. In the hangars of Earls Court, 100% Design, the contemporary home-design jamboree, celebrates its tenth anniversary.
It started out as a fringe event in a tent on the Kings Road. Now it has its own fringe, Designersblock, showcasing “conceptual design” (ie, sofas that think they’re BritArt). And lording it over the lot, the umbrella event, the London Design Festival, of which Sorrell is chairman and co-founder.
Creativity, you see, has changed London, too. It has mysteriously transformed these past two decades from Imperial Powerhouse into a nation of cappuccino-supping contemporary-furniture consumers who all think they’ll win the next Pop Idol. Everyone wants to be creative. Today Richard Florida’s book, The Rise of the Creative Class, is being doled out to mayors like some post-industrial Little Red Book to save the Western economy. Every city from Beijing to Nuneaton wants to be the world’s creative capital.
“They all want our crown,” says Sorrell. London still reigns supreme. “If there were a creative Olympics, Britain would win hands down. We’ve had the technological revolution. Now we’re having the creative revolution.”
Estate agents routinely trot out stats on the East End having more resident artists than Renaissance Florence. Creativity, thinks Sorrell, “is in Londoners’ blood”, their city, since the Sixties, romantically seen as some kind of Peter Ackroyd-esque creatively chaotic stereotype, built on a shabby make-do culture of iconoclasm and individualism that draws arty migrants from around the world. We have that quality so vital to creativity — buzz.
“Why London and not Milan or Tokyo?” asks Paul Priestman, a product designer, who launches his Yotel! design for Paul Woodruffe’s Yo! chain this week at 100% Design. “It’s the street scene. That grittiness, that griminess. Londoners are like magpies. We collect all this stuff that drifts in, cobble it together, then send it back out to the world.”
Last year the Italian newspaper La Repubblica risked being lynched for suggesting that Milan had been usurped as world style capital. But what about the bottom line? “There’s still somehow the impression the creative industries are intangible,” says Sorrell. “There’ll always be those who think they’re airy fairy.”
How can a nation that once made sturdy things such as ships and empires now support itself on branding consultants and directional interior decor? What do all those website designers and fashionistas do all day? Make money, of course. A survey this year by Creative London, a new body uniting creative industries, unearthed 525,000 people working in the sector. That’s one in five. It’s worth £21 billion a year.
It’s growing at 8.2 per cent a year. The creative industry is bigger than the City. Buying directional sofas is Britain’s last economic hope.
And, if further proof were needed, look again at the case of John Sorrell, whose life has clung to the back of London’s transformation. He entered Hornsey College of Art in the early Sixties, aged 16. “I showed my acceptance letter to my old man, he said, ‘Go for that one’, pointing at Commercial Art. ‘Sounds like there’s a bit of money in that.’ ”
And so there was. Sorrell, with his wife and business partner Frances, set up Europe’s biggest corporate identity consultants, Newell & Sorrell, branding up most infamously, British Airways. It was Newell & Sorrell’s “one world” tailfins for Bob Ayling that Margaret Thatcher so memorably handbagged. They sold up in the late Nineties to commission their house and their charity, the Sorrell Foundation, “to inspire creativity in young people”, and for Sorrell to concentrate on transforming the Design Council from fading 1950s-style quango into the epitome of new Labour slick. Today, Britain’s transformation into iPod Nation is complete.
Some, though, still need convincing. New Labour, he says, has been more than supportive. “But the City still hasn’t recognised how significant the industry is. It doesn’t carry the same front-page media clout as, say, the financial sector. It will.”
The big creative money stays in Milan, Paris and New York. It comes to London Fashion Week not for the deals but to snap up graduates from London’s much envied art-school system, which trains about a quarter of the world’s designers.
“When I started there were no big design companies,” says Sorrell. “Now there are hundreds. In sheer commercial terms, that’s the sign of a maturing industry. But we’re just not good enough at shouting loudly.”
Michael Frye, head of Creative London, is trying to whip the creative sector’s cottage industries into a serious economic bloc. Those other creative hubs — Stockholm, Barcelona, Berlin, those rising cities in China — all expert in marketing themselves, are eager to grab our crown.
London so far has been reticent, relying on the quality of its creative exports to speak for itself. “It’s not enough to have ideas,” says Frye, “you have to make them sustainable. The creative industries are seen by the public and private sector as a more difficult, less predictable, return. They’re more likely to put their money into biotech than in getting a band off the ground.” His plan is to cluster businesses and creative types so that they’re easier and less risky to invest in. “Yes the creative industries are a risk, but the results can be enormous.”
But all this talk of brands and returns is anathema to many who have made Creative London. They worry that as London’s creative industry gets all serious, the very thing it has going for it — its creative chaos — will disappear. “You can see it happening already,” says Shelley Fox, a fashion designer. “We survived Cool Britannia, but still now everything’s being packaged up together.
“That’s London’s big creative challenge,” says Frye. “How to grab the golden egg without killing the goose.”
- London Design Festival, various venues, www.londondesignfestival.com, until Sept 30
